Station 43: Displaced on Thanksgiving

Every year, the Mike Alstott Family Foundation donates groceries for a Thanksgiving dinner to every fire station in Hillsborough County. It is a generous gift that helps feed both the firefighters at the station and the families that come to join them on Thursday afternoon for a big family meal.

Each truckload of groceries includes a turkey, mashed potatoes, vegetables, stuffing, coffee, and a cheesecake. It's a generous donation, and Alstott does it for fire departments across Tampa Bay.

The donated meal never makes it to Station 43, though, because Station 43 is so small it barely has a kitchen. Instead, 43 joins Station 5 for Thanksgiving dinner every year, less than 2 miles away.

A different kind of holiday

Thanksgiving is a time when families -- both by birth and by choice - gather to catch up with each other, reflect on the year, and break bread.

As Fire Rescue also is a big family, it is a big holiday around the firehouse. At most Hillsborough fire stations, families come to join the firefighters on shift to eat a hearty meal and reflect, share stories, and get to know their "fire family" even better.

With the fundamentals covered by the Alstott Family Foundation, crew members and families sometimes add their own traditions to the feast table.

Midday on Thanksgiving often is a slower time for calls at the station, but if a unit gets dispatched at dinner, the meal goes on until they return.

Thanksgiving is the only holiday that usually plays out at the station like this. Christmas, Easter, and Independence Day often can feel like any other day at a Hillsborough County fire station, but Thanksgiving is special.

Small but mighty

Station 43 has to travel over the river and through the woods (so to speak) for Thanksgiving because it is not a traditional fire station like the other 45 in Hillsborough County. It is the last structural evidence of the days when Hillsborough County had separate fire and Emergency Medical Service (EMS) departments.

Situated in the parking lot beside AdventHealth medical center on Fletcher Avenue, the station is by far the smallest of Hillsborough County's 46 stations because it was built only to serve a rescue truck (ambulance).

At one point, Hillsborough had 16 EMS "stations," - many of which were run out of mobile offices parked in County Park parking lots.

Hillsborough County merged fire and EMS in 1997 and did away with most of the EMS stations, but kept Station 43 because of its strategic location in one of the busiest parts of the County. Rescue 43 (the ambulance that works from the station) is the sixth-busiest rescue unit in the County. It plays a critical role in lowering response times in the area and maintaining low Unit Hour Utilization, a measurement Fire Rescue uses to determine which stations are busiest.