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By Cameron Small
Hometown Weekly Intern
Towel? Check. Swim suit? Check. Goggles? Check.
This was not just an everyday inventory checklist for a day at the beach, or a weekend down the Cape. It was what most people brought to Westwood’s Annual Fireman’s Foam event held last Wednesday, July 13 at the Sheehan school field, held thanks to the Westwood Recreation Department.
No one at the Westwood fire department was exactly sure when it started. A few thought it was around twenty years ago that the annual event started. Others thought the twenty-fifth anniversary of the event was a few years previously, and that this year’s event was the twenty-seventh or twenty-eighth.
What the present members of the fire department could agree on was that it was the usual sized turnout, somewhere between three and four hundred people. Cars lined Pond Street from the school driveway all the way past Arcadia Road, a distance over a half-mile. People were parking at the small Buckmaster Pond parking lot and walking the length of the pond to get a chance to play in the foam in spite of the hot weather.
If you’re concerned about children playing in fire retardant foam, don’t worry—it’s not the chemical foam firefighters would use to fight fires (though, according to the fire department, that wouldn’t be harmful to children either). Instead, it’s simply Dawn dish soap mixed with water sprayed out of the firefighter’s hoses.
One firefighter joked that his favorite part of the day was “going home.” More seriously, they agreed that “It’s fun to watch the kids. The kids have a good time.”
