Excerpts from the Kenoshanews.com:
At 100 feet in the air, Fire Chief Doug McElmury and Pleasant Prairie firefighters train on the village’s new aerial fire truck.
For McElmury and his firefighters, this $1.1 million, state-of-the-art ladder truck is one a significant upgrade, replacing a 29-year-old version. The older truck, he said, is being sold.
The new truck was featured at the Wisconsin Emergency Medical Services Association Conference in January and took two years to custom design. It was approved in the village’s budget as part of scheduled equipment replacement.
He points out the nearby industrial park, which contains plants such as Emco Chemical and Rustoleum. But the village also has senior citizen apartment complexes that are multiple stories, as well as multi-family apartments.
The new … tower ladder … is useful during rescues at multi-family units and senior housing …
The master streams … can be operated via remote … from a remote control unit that can be used to set the parameters of the stream, including oscillation.
“We can use them on a fog stream for flammable liquids, or to cool things down. Or, a smooth bore which will penetrate through if we need to get at some Class A combustibles or a building,” he said.
“We can actually back up about a quarter mile, and we can use a remote. Once we get the water flowing, we can back up and do it from there.”
The entire truck with the ladder weighs about 78,000 pounds, and the truck is 47 feet long and 11 feet high, equipped with LED lighting that enables it to be used as a light tower. With the remote control, firefighters are able to us thermal imaging to find hot and cool spots during a fire.
Running the truck will be the fire department’s pump operators. On Saturday, the crews on all three shifts finished the factory training. In-house training will go on for four or five weeks. McElmury said the community won’t be seeing the new rig on calls until April.
“This is a pretty complicated piece of equipment. Probably the most complicated piece of equipment most departments own is an aerial.”
“There’s a lot that goes into this truck,” he said. “The ladder is the main feature seen on the truck, but what we really have here is a rolling toolbox.”
thanks Dan
