It was retired high school teacher Jan Curran who stated what the majority of local residents must have been thinking as they studied a Fire Optimization Plan that left out the far shores of Prince Edward County — on the map they were grey zones, meaning out of reach in any decent length of time — in favour of quicker response times in the central portion of the island — a nice big green zone marked all those areas that would have a firetruck on the doorstep in 14 minutes or less.

Ms. Curran, who taught science to thousands of local secondary students and was one the most thoughtful and progressive instructors during her two plus decades as a member of the PECI faculty, had several concerns following consultant Phil Dawson’s presentation last week at a Committee of the Whole meeting.

Cost of real estate was one, for a Wellington station to be relocated to the corner of County Roads 1 and 2. Never mind a water table that struggles to produce in the high heat of summer. But then there were all those homeowners — family, friends, or not,  simply left off the grid in the new plan.

“I do have friends who will lose service at Huyck’s Bay, Cressy, Long Point…The rationale for today’s report just doesn’t work for me and I’m sure it doesn’t work for a lot of the citizens in Prince Edward County,” she concluded.

At its core, Prince Edward County is a community bande á part from the rural reality elsewhere in Ontario.

First of all, our island mindset means that an “us against the world” mentality permeates. Despite our internal divisions, that close-knit feeling one might find in Cape Breton or Newfoundland or any other spit of land surrounded by deep blue definitely exists here.

Secondly, Loyalist culture was firmly interwoven among the old stock families and forms the social fabric of the community today. The truth is the Reynolds, the Bongards, the Williams, the Harrisons, the Macaulays, and the MacDonells were far more than neighbours in the County’s earliest days. They were very much a network, an extended family, trying to subsist in an unforgivingly hard scrabble. Those neighbourly connections ran deep in the pre-and early post-Confederation days. They had to if you were going to survive winter.

Those “love-thy-neighbour”  sentiments are still in evidence. Just look at our dedicated volunteer firefighting contingent. How could scores of men and women willing to drop everything at a pager’s buzzing notice to rush to help a neighbour at the highest level of crisis be described as anything but love?

There were clear winners and losers in the fire plan as it was presented.

First among the losers were the volunteers of our fire-fighting and rescue force. Way more than a dozen from all corners of the County were incredibly disheartened. It’s not outside the realm of probability that, were said plan ever implemented, half the volunteer firefighters and first responders in Prince Edward County would walk into Chief Chad Brown’s office, lay their pagers on his desk, and say, “It’s been a slice.”

What the architects of this plan failed to recognize is that this is a community that cares about and for one another. Always has.

So when our cousins and friends in the grey zone are going to lose in fire service while we gain, it doesn’t sit well with any of us.

We understand the complex, spread out geography of Prince Edward County can be an organizational nightmare when comes to planning Fire & Rescue services for the coming years. But a high-cost fire optimization plan — consider only the initial outlay required for station consolidation — that leaves our friends, family and neighbours on the outside looking in needs to go back to the drawing board.