Fire Departments to Purchase New Trucks

The Gibraltar and Sister Bay/Liberty Grove Fire Departments are each purchasing a new truck.

The Gibraltar Fire Department has designed a new fire truck to replace the one that caught fire at the station during a routine truck maintenance check in early fall.

The fire started with the primer pump, part of the truck’s electrical system. That caused the truck’s entire electrical system to burn, too, heating up enough to melt the rubber hoses and steel lines.

“The old one was a great truck, up until the day it wasn’t,” said Gibraltar Fire Chief Caleb Whitney.

Photo by Len Villano.

The old truck was a pumper – the truck with equipment to fight fires but not much water. On a call, it’s what firefighters use to move water from the tender (the water storage truck) to the fire.

Insurance would have covered fixing the truck, but Whitney said the firefighters wouldn’t be able to trust the machine again.

“It’s not melodramatic to say our lives depend on these trucks,” Whitney said. “That’s your lifeline, and you’re wondering when the ghost in the machine is going to burn off again.”

Instead, the department will combine a $12,200 insurance payout, the $6,000 generated from the sale of the burned engine, the trade-in value on the station’s 16-year-old tender and the $75,000 of the levy limit override Town of Gibraltar residents approved to replace the burned engine with a pumper tender.

A pumper tender is a $380,000 truck that fills the role of a tender that hauls water and an engine that pumps it. It will be outfitted with a compressed air foam system, which makes water better at fighting fires. The new pumper tender will also replace the station’s 16-year-old tender, which will drop from a value of $50,000 to $15,000 in four years, when it’s scheduled to be replaced.

“We took a $2 million capital improvement plan, and by combining two trucks we turned it into a $1.5 million capital improvement plan,” Whitney said. “It puts a better truck in our station that makes up for a lack of manpower, that makes for a faster response, for a cheaper price, reduces the day-to-day requirements on our staff and saves the community money… Now we only have to learn to drive one truck instead of two, take care of one truck instead of two, put [equipment] on one truck instead of two.”

The Sister Bay/Liberty Grove department is purchasing a new truck that department Chief Chris Hecht called a “tender pumper” rather than a pumper tender, because its primary purpose will be to haul water and, to a smaller degree, fight fires.

Hecht estimates the new truck will cost $375,000, but doesn’t know how much the department will get from selling the trucks it will replace (one pumper and two tenders).

Neither department has chosen a vendor to build the truck, but Hecht expects to do so before Jan. 1, 2014. The departments will try to design similar trucks and choose the same vendor to save on engineering and manufacturing costs, and hope to have the trucks delivered in September 2014.