Stroudsburg VFD secures UTV through state grant with help from Probst
Rep. Tarah Probst August 20, 2025 | 10:35 AM
HARRISBURG, Aug. 20 – A utility terrain vehicle received by the Stroudsburg Volunteer Fire Department at the end of June has already been used to respond to one emergency incident.
The UTV was obtained through a $74,000 Department of Community and Economic Development grant with the help and direction of state Rep. Tarah Probst, said Mehmet Barzev, assistant fire chief and public information officer for the Stroudsburg VFD.
“Rep. Probst alerted us that there were DCED grants available, so right away, we filed,” he said. “A year later, we had the vehicle in our firehouse, so that was great.”
Barzev said that with proper training and appropriate use, the UTV can be a valuable asset in the emergency response community.
“They’re a smaller footprint and much more agile, so they can access patients in remote locations where before, it would be manual labor, or trying to squeeze pick-up trucks down levee trails,” he said.
“This is a huge deal, because they are a volunteer fire company and funds are limited,” Probst said. “They risk their lives to help others for free and pay for all of their training, and they do it because they are the heroes of our community.”
In recent weeks, the UTV was assembled and lettered and those who will operate it took an Emergency Vehicle Operations Course training session.
Barzev said the UTV was recently used to access a remote part of Glen Park in Stroudsburg, where a resident of a homeless encampment there was experiencing cardiac arrest.
“It’s calls like that that are the reason why we pursued a vehicle like this,” Barzev said, outlining how, since COVID, the number of unhoused members living in Glen Park has increased, in addition to the number of people using the park for offroad bicycling and hiking.
“We noticed a spike in outdoor related calls,” Barzev said. “It’s usually hard to access and extricate those people,” he explained, resulting in having to call in mutual aid companies.
Additionally, challenges accessing and managing brush fires encouraged the department to pursue the grant to purchase the UTV, which is equipped with a tank, pump and hose, and a patient compartment to secure a victim.