On a Sunday afternoon in early October, the far end of Masterson Station Park fills with a line of red trucks, and the people who normally arrive only when something has gone wrong stand around handing out stickers. The Lexington Fire Prevention Festival runs from 2 to 6 p.m. on October 4, 2026, at the park's fairgrounds on Leestown Road. It is free, it is open to anyone who walks in, and it is built around a simple, slightly unusual idea: let the public climb on the equipment, ride in it, and watch it work, all before they ever have to see it in an emergency.
The lineup is deliberately hands-on. There are fire truck rides, a large touch-a-truck area, inflatables and a children's play zone, live fire and rescue demonstrations, community partner tables, and food truck vendors. Firefighters run burn demonstrations and show off tools like the jaws of life. In past years the department has also brought out its fire safety truck and offered wellness screenings alongside the games, which is why the event has sometimes been billed as the Fire Prevention and Wellness Festival. The point, as one firefighter put it to LEX 18, is that "it kinda gets them to where they can see, you know, that we're much more than just going and putting water on fire."
The festival is the Lexington Fire Department's own production, timed to October, which is national Fire Prevention Month. One recent edition used "Smoke Alarms: Make Them Work for You," turning the festival into a soft-sell campaign for working smoke detectors. The messaging is consistent: check your alarms, know how to stop, drop, and roll, and have a home escape plan. Firefighter Shane Burger told LEX 18 that the department responds to roughly 65,000 calls a year, about 15,000 of them fire runs, and that events like this one help residents get to know the department before an emergency forces the introduction. "There's a good chance somebody in the community that you know or care about has had some type of dealing with the Lexington Fire Department," he said.
The event's roots run deeper than a single afternoon of bounce houses. In 2021 the department marked its 150th anniversary with a week of programming, including a Fire Truck Muster that displayed vehicles from its first motorized truck in 1911 up through the modern fleet, and the department's first downtown parade in seven years. The anniversary events fed into that year's Fire Prevention Festival, which drew more than 40 vendors to Masterson Station Park. The parade tradition is older still, and it has faded in and out. Denise Nave, a Lexington resident who told Spectrum News she and her family are annual attendees and the first group in line when the gates open, remembered that the department "usually" held a parade downtown, and suggested cost and logistics had changed the format over time. What remains is the park-based festival, which has become the department's main public-facing event of the year.
The festival has not run uninterrupted. After the 2019 edition, held at the park on September 29, COVID-19 and then bad weather forced a two-year pause, and the event returned in 2022 with lines stretching from the gate nearly to the end of the street. That return edition leaned hard on interaction: fire hose and archery training simulators, bouncy houses, and a row of trucks parked at the end of the park for rides in both vintage and current red apparatus. A Lexington fire recruit named Claybrook taught CPR to kids and community members that day, telling Spectrum News that he had grown up playing with fire trucks and was steered toward the job by friends already on it. "So I applied and I was very fortunate enough to be in the position that I am," he said. It is the kind of sentence the festival exists to produce.
The setting does some of the work too. Masterson Station Park, at 3051 Leestown Road, is one of Lexington's largest public spaces, a broad sweep of open ground in the city's northwest that holds a soccer complex, playground, sprayground, picnic shelters, and an equestrian facility with cross-country and dressage courses. The annual county fair is held there, and the Masterson Equestrian Trust keeps the riding side of the park running. For one afternoon a year, the fairgrounds portion of it becomes a fire-safety classroom with a carnival attached.
What makes the format worth noting is how rare it is. Most fire-safety education happens in school assemblies, where firefighters visit students, as they did at Julius Marks Elementary in the days before one recent festival. The festival inverts that: instead of the department going to the public, the public comes to the department, on a Sunday, with no ticket and no agenda. Families wait in line for a ride in a truck that, on another day, would be arriving at a house fire. Kids climb into the driver's seat. Adults ask about smoke alarms. Vendors from community organizations set up tables nearby.
The 2026 edition runs October 4 from 2 to 6 p.m. at Masterson Station Park. It is free, general admission, and open to anyone. Organizers advise checking with the department before heading out, since details can shift. But the shape of the thing is reliable: trucks, demonstrations, food, and a department making its case to the public it serves, one fire truck ride at a time.