Firehouse

It all started with drinks after a long week at work and ended with a 14-year-old Havertown boy lying unconscious on a busy Delaware County street. On Monday, former Delaware County Assistant District Attorney Michael Donohue, 31, of Havertown, was charged with being the driver of the car involved in a Nov. 4 hit-and-run that left the boy hospitalized with serious injuries. Donohue has been charged with aggravated assault, accident involving death or personal injury, recklessly endangering another person, and related crimes.

You may be immersed in the final season of Rescue Me , but John Scurti and the rest of the cast of FX's towering inferno of a series said goodbye more than a year ago when the episodes you're seeing now were shot. "It seems like a distant but pleasant memory," says Scurti of the show, which runs until Sept. 7. For seven years, as FDNY Lt. Kenny Shea, Scurti played Falstaff to Denis Leary's haunted Hal. The guys in the firehouse always called him Lou, an affectionate acknowledgment of his rank.

Caught a world-premiere movie the other night at the Glenside firehouse. No popcorn, but the stars turned out. There were Lisa Erkert, a volunteer with the Cheltenham Village fire company, and Rashawn Spann from La Mott. Spann got the biggest applause from the audience when he told the cameras how two years ago, at 17, he was too young to fight fires, so he let everyone else get off the truck before him when they pulled up to a burning house. First step onto the ground he slipped on the ice and slid under the truck.

A former Deptford Township volunteer firefighter was sentenced Monday to four years and four months in prison for stealing $589,000 from his fire company, including funds to rebuild the firehouse after a devastating 2008 blaze. Charles V. Mancini III, 46, of Wenonah, turned to face about a dozen of his old colleagues from the New Sharon Volunteer Fire Department who sat stoically in the gallery during his sentencing at U.S. District Court in Camden. "I acted out of greed," Mancini said.

BROWNOUTS, THE closing of some firehouses on a rotating basis, are stupid. Fires don't decide when to start in any geographical pattern that can be predicted with the certainty to allow specific firehouses to be closed some of the time and open at others. Public safety is a core responsibility of municipal government. Clearly the city is duty bound to make provisions for adequate fire safety. What should the city do? Option 1: The city conducts a study to determine the number and location of firehouses that would adequately provide a responsible level of fire safety.

Mayor Nutter's recent announcement about "rolling closures" of fire companies in Philadelphia is dangerous and ill-conceived ("Nutter cuts city budget by $47 million," July 15). His decision to close fire-suppression companies on a daily and regular basis is tantamount to playing Russian roulette with the lives and property of the citizens of Philadelphia. It also jeopardizes the lives of emergency responders. Does he even know the difference between an engine company and a ladder company, and what their capabilities and duties are?

It's been months since Mark Hebler leaped into the cab of the 1989 FMC/Spartan pumper at Cherry Hill Fire Company No. 1, flipped on the siren, and raced to a blaze. He's ready for another call, though, ready to jump out of bed in the middle of the night, ready for something like the hardware store fire on Route 70 last April. "We did a real good job on that one," Hebler remembered, sitting around the firehouse on a recent night. "Me and Holmesy, we put a stop on that one. " But there may not be any more fire runs for Hebler, John Holmes, or anyone else at Company No. 1. In October, the Cherry Hill Fire Department deactivated the company and cut off its funding, leaving its 15 or so members little to do other than sit around the firehouse they own on Beechwood Avenue, shoot some pool, and maybe wax the tricked-out brush truck they enter at firefighting competitions.

A reverse-discrimination case involving Connecticut firefighters being heard by the U.S. Supreme Court today may show just how out of sync this court is with the nation's first African American president. Chief Justice John G. Roberts calls affirmative action the "sordid business" of "divvying us up by race. " He prefers to declare the playing field level for everyone, while blithely turning a blind eye to vestiges of discrimination that perpetuate inequality. Racial bias is perhaps nowhere more evident than within some of this nation's municipal fire departments.

Center City's Engine Company 4 handled hundreds of hot situations before the city shut it down in 1984. Nowadays, fires are blazing in the kitchen and in two fireplaces at the new pub Ladder 15 (1528 Sansom St., 215-964-9755). The owners, who have the more downscale Mad River locations in Old City and Manayunk, have added a balcony to the 35-foot ceilings and given the place an industrial look, with two fireplaces (more fire), lots of steel, and stone-and-mesh walls. A private room is due on the third floor.

Montgomery County prosecutors will not charge the mother who left her hour-old newborn outside a Plymouth Township fire station Sunday. The mother, who is 29 and from the township, learned on the Internet two months before giving birth that safe-haven laws in some states allow babies to be dropped off at police stations and firehouses, but apparently did not realize Pennsylvania requires that infants be left at hospitals, District Attorney Risa...