New Year’s Eve 1970 placed the department battling what is considered the worst fire in the company’s history. Men and machines went up against fifty-mile-per-hour winds, snow, sleet, and rain to battle a fire in the business district that for several hours resembled photos from London during World War II. The men and machines won out in the end, but only after the fire had exacted a terrible price on stores and houses. Nine Lewes Firemen were injured in 1983 when on engine collided with another. Christmas Day 1983, again with fifty-mile-per-hour winds and a temperature of nine degrees, placed the department in service at Pilot Point on Lewes Beach. Windchill factors were thirty below as firemen and apparatus from fifteen communities raced to assist us in conditions that were not fit for man nor beast. What type of person leaves their family on Christmas Day, to go out in thirty-below windchill, get wet to climb a ladder with two inches of ice on it, to become so cold that they no longer have any feeling and are well into the danger zone, to hold a nozzle spraying water that encloses them like an ice cube, pass up Christmas dinner for a cup of cold coffee and an even colder ham sandwich? The answer is simple!! It is the men and women who comprise the membership of this two-hundred-year-old organization and every other volunteer fire department since the days of Ben Franklin. Since 1796 citizens of Lewes have stepped forward to join the ranks of the town’s volunteer fire service. For two hundred years the ranks have been filled with men and women wanting to provide Service For Others.