Stanley, Virginia, May 15th —On a bitterly cold night this past March, a tragic fire near Lotus Garden took the life of a 5-year old neighbor, Auna Sherfey, and burned her family's home to the ground. In the sad days that followed, Lotus Garden joined the Stanley community in offering prayers and material donations to the family.
This tragedy was a reminder to everyone of just how difficult it is to get water to fires in rural areas such as our own where there are few hydrants.
In the wake of this event, Lotus Garden has offered its full cooperation and support to the Stanley Volunteer Fire Department in installing a fire hydrant in the pond here at Lotus Garden. Firemen will be able refill their pump trucks with our pond water and not have to make the long drive back to town to refill. We are happy to say that this new hydrant will protect over 300 homes in the nearby community. The new hydrant will protect not only our neighbors who are without ponds, but will also protect Lotus Garden itself should fire ever break out on our land.
We at Lotus Garden consider ourselves very fortunate to have the opportunity to be of further service to the Stanley community in its efforts to address the issue of fire safety.
To aid in fire safety in rural areas, hydrants are often installed in ponds so that pump trucks can refill without having to make the trip back to their stations, thus losing precious time in fighting a fire. For the past four years, Stanley firefighter Lieutenant Keith Higgs had been using Google Earth to identify suitable ponds in Page County from satellite photos. Higgs had already determined that Lotus Garden was the most perfect pond in the area in terms of size (about 1 million gallons), depth, clarity and proximity to the road. Although he had identified a number of promising ponds, he had been unable to obtain funds from the Commonwealth of Virginia to carry out his crusade to install these much-needed hydrants.
The Sherfey fire raised the priority of Stanley for funding and so Higgs seized the opportunity to personally visit each pond owner he had identified and urge them to let the fire company install a hydrant. Convinced of the importance of ponds as a vital link for fire safety in rural areas, Jetsün Khandro Rinpoche immediately agreed that Lotus Garden should support this critical project.
Although the Lotus Garden staff expressed concern about the possibility that a lowered water level could compromise pond life, Higgs reassured us that completely filling a pump truck would lower the water level in the one million gallon pond by no more than 1/2 inch.
This past weekend Higgs, joined by a family-owned digging company from Richmond, arrived at Lotus Garden armed with a backhoe, wet suits, pipes and tools and installed a new red and white dry pump hydrant in our pond here at Lotus Garden.
Higgs recalls that as a young firefighter his goal was extinguishing fires, but that his goal in life now is fire prevention and he tirelessly devotes himself to raising public awareness. He tells a favorite story about speaking to a class of school children about the pond hydrant project. Like the Lotus Garden staff, the children were concerned about low water levels, but they were more worried that unsuspecting fish might be sucked into the fire truck's water reservoir and then be sprayed out and into the fire by the firefighters. The image of fish flying out of the hose and into the flames always brings a chuckle, Higgs confesses, but he reassured the Lotus Garden staff, as he had the youngsters, that a secure screen would prevent fish from entering the pipe.
Lotus Garden would like to thank Lieutenant Keith Higgs for all his dedicated work on behalf of fire safety for the Stanley community, and is grateful for this opportunity to serve the community. It is our hope and prayer that the efforts of Lieutenant Higgs and the Stanley Volunteer Fire Department will help to avert any future tragedies in our community.
Report submitted by Linda Fisher.
Special thanks to Sudie Hargis and Geoff Picus for their help with this story.