“Volunteer First Responder Recognition and Honor Parade” runs east-to-west along East Main Street in Downtown Luray
By Randy Arrington
LURAY, April 4 — Bonnie Anthony remembers being evacuated from her home on the side of Waterfall Mountain bordering the Shenandoah Forest subdivision on March 20.
“It’s scary to leave your house that way,” she recalls. “When you can’t see the Valley for the smoke, and then when you leave and look back you can’t see your home for the smoke.”
Neighbors stayed in touch with one another and friends offered her a place to stay if she needed it, but the ones who truly garnered Anthony’s gratitude during that time were the volunteer firefighters and first responders who kept her home from being one of the 10 in the Page Valley that was turned to ash, or the handful of others that were damaged in some way.
“This really hit close to home for me…no pun intended,” Anthony said earlier this week, “and we wanted to think of a way to thank them.”
So Anthony met with the chiefs of all three volunteer fire departments in the Page Valley and discussed the possibility of a parade in Luray. Once they seemed receptive to the idea, she approached the Town of Luray and the Luray Police Department to get the proper permitting and permission to shut down East Main Street to accommodate a parade.
The “Volunteer First Responder Recognition and Honor Parade” is set for 1 p.m. this Saturday, April 6 “to honor our volunteer first responders for all they did saving lives, land and property during the fires.” The parade will start with staging in the East End Shopping Center at 12:30 p.m. Once the parade kicks off at 1 p.m., it will travel west down Main Street all the way to Broad Street.
While the focus is on the county’s three volunteer fire departments and two rescue squads, “no one is being excluded at all,” Anthony said. The fire team from Shenandoah National Park will be included in the parade and invitations were also extended to forest service firefighters and employees of Shenandoah Valley Electric Cooperative.
The parade will be lead by two people carrying a banner reading “Thank You Firefighters” that will be borrowed from Blue Ridge Bank. The Luray-based bank placed the sign in front of its downtown branch along Main Street following the wildfires in late March. The banner will be followed by others who helped the volunteers in the wings, and of course fire engines from all three departments, ambulances from the rescue squads, and other vehicles from agencies involved in the widespread effort to combat the wildfires.
“When things happen, people come together,” Anthony said, “and it doesn’t matter what part of the county you live in, or what side of the river…people in this community come together to help one another.”
Anthony has a simply image in her mind of what success will look like on Saturday.
“I want to see people lining the streets with signs saying, ‘You saved my home’, ‘You saved my land’ and ‘Thank you’.”
East Main Street in Luray will be shut down from the insection with Broad Street in the center of downtown to Reservoir Avenue at the East End Shopping Center from about 12:45 to 1:45 p.m.
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