Fire Truck Goes into Service this Thursday

The Pella Fire Department meets tomorrow evening for a regular training session, and we're betting most of the 28 volunteer firefighters will fill the training room as the Department introduces its newest fire truck. Following the meeting and training session, the truck will be moved to the front of the fire station on Main Street, and will be the "first out" truck for rural traffic accidents, alarms, small structure fires, and grass fires. It will sit next to the City's quick attack truck, "first out" for City calls.

Captain Randy Bogaard says the department had been looking to replace their 1989 rural pick-up grass rig and happened upon this quick attack brush fighter truck. The $110,000 truck purchased comes from the forty-year-old Weis Fire Equipment Company in Salina, Kansas.

"This is a Wildlands pumper truck," Bogaard said, explaining that "They have vast prairies out there and talk about square miles instead of the square acres we talk about. Having this truck means we don't have to take out the big pumper truck as often, or to wrecks, or to fires where its size isn't really required." The Fire Department responds to vehicular accidents because of the potential for fire, currently taking the big pumper. These quick attack trucks are four-wheel drive vehicles, certainly an advantage in the kind of weather we've been having this winter. "No one wants to see the big fire trucks slipping off the roads," Bogaard added.

Features provided by the new truck not available with the old include traffic control devices, a larger (500 gallon) water capacity, ten gallons of foam on board (water cools a fire, foam smothers it, so water infused with a continuous small quantity of foam is a great fire fighter), and a mounted remote nozzle on the front bumper. It can be manned or unmanned, programmed and operated from the cab.

"None of our other vehicles can pump and spray on the go," said Bogaard, "which means we can be circling a fire to contain it and fight it at the same time."

Which truck pulls out of the station when the fire alarm sounds? "Depends on hydrants," explained Bogaard. "We take a city truck if we have access to fire hydrants; we take a rural response vehicle if we don't."

The life span of one of these trucks is about 20 years. This is the last the Pella Department had with a metal tank. "Corrosion of the tank over the years is the big issue," said Bogaard. "Now the tanks are half-inch thick plastic. " The Department is keeping the 1989 truck.

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