A Southeast Nebraska city participated in Tuesday's National Night Out initiative, with many local organizations on hand to increase their presence in and give back to their community.

For most of the last decade, service and faith-based organizations from throughout the Fairbury area have combined their forces for a joint local back to school drive plus nationwide National Night Out programming.

"Our goal is to bring fire prevention awareness, to get the community used to us, our presence," said Heather McCown a lieutenant and volunteer firefight with the Fairbury Rural Fire Department. "The ambulance, they do educational things, same thing with the dispatchers and the sheriff’s office, just kind of educating the community on what we’re doing and what we're about, and that we’re here to help and not to harm. Just to make our presence more of a positive, instead of a negative."

Tuesday night marked the latest installment of this end-of-summer event hosted in Fairbury's City Park. Setting up demonstrations were members of the Fairbury fire department, ambulance crews, dispatchers, and the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office. Visitors got hands-on exposure to Nebraska Game and Parks, got a special visit from and an up close look in a StarCare medical helicopter, and got a crash course in some of the many capabilities of Emergency Management Services' fleet of drones.

"We’ll use them for fire scenes...we can get up in the air, we can see through the smoke where the fire’s at and report back to everybody, tell them where everything is," said Jeff Nelson, a key member of many local fire departments. "We can let them know how the fire’s moving, how quick it’s moving, if it’s about ready to get into a farmstead."

The drones are augmented by thermal sensors that send readings back to monitors mounted in the EMS vehicles.

"White is hot, black is not. We have different color palettes we can use – if I pick this one, it shows more definition, so it really depends on what you’re looking for, how granular you need to get," explained Brad Eisenhauer, who along with Nelson make up the Jefferson County IT department. "In a big grass fire, it sees right through the smoke, so we can tell them [dispatch or first responders], you can see all the smoke here but the fire’s actually further over this way. It works on a structure fire too: you can get out and see the outside of the house, see that it’s extending through this wall, it’s up in the attic, wherever it may be." 

And inside Fairbury's community building, three different churches joined forces to provide a clothing drive for students of all ages, letting kids and parents get a backpack and stuff them with clothes, shoes and other items. Next door, with school in Fairbury scheduled to re-start next week, Maxson's Barber Shop set up shop to provide free back to school haircuts.

"The departments started it, and then it just kind of got bigger. The churches started joining in and then Maxson’s came in, and it just grew," said McCown, who's served on the department for eight years. "It grew like a family does, it started with one entity, and then another one joined, and another one joined, and we just got bigger. It’s just a family and community getting together."

All different kinds of organizations were on hand to make the event a success once again, and all were united by what they're calling a calling to help and serve others.

"I don’t look at it as like a job. I don’t think any of us look at is as like a job," McCown said. "It’s something that you’re called to do, it’s a calling more than anything. We all have a passion to help others and to serve others, so that’s what we do: your life is worth our time."