About The Oldest City Fire Journal

The Oldest City Fire Journal is an independent magazine about fire safety, written for the households of St. Augustine and St. Johns County, Florida. It publishes plain guides on the subjects that decide how a home fares in a fire: where smoke alarms belong, how an escape plan gets rehearsed, what the first thirty seconds of a kitchen fire ask of a cook, when yard burning needs an authorization, and how far a generator belongs from the bedroom window.

What the magazine is and is not

The Journal is not a government agency, not a fire department and not an emergency service. In an emergency, the number to call is the emergency number for the area. The magazine covers its subjects in the third person as journalism: it reads the public guidance of the U.S. Fire Administration, Ready.gov, the National Fire Protection Association, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Florida Forest Service, and it explains what that guidance means for the older wooden houses, the storm seasons and the salt air of this coast.

The history of this domain

This domain carried the public website of a municipal fire department for many years, and the questions its visitors asked, about smoke alarms, escape planning, burn permits, community alerts and joining the service, are the questions this magazine still answers. The old addresses redirect to the closest current guides, so a link saved a decade ago still lands somewhere useful. Nothing on this site claims the identity, the authority or the endorsement of any fire department, past or present.

How the guides are written

Each guide ends with a gesture the reader can make the same evening, because advice that cannot be acted on tonight is decoration. Facts are drawn from the public sources named in the guides, local specifics are pointed at the county and city offices that hold the current answers, and nothing is invented for color. The editorial team writes collectively; corrections and source suggestions are welcome by email from the contact page.