Fire Department expects Quint to be ready by May
Date: 2/5/2015
LONGMEADOW – The town’s
new Quint fire truck, set to replace the more than 25-year-old Engine 3, was recently ordered and is anticipated to arrive sometime in mid May.
At the
Nov. 18 Special Town Meeting residents approved a citizen’s petitioned article calling for the purchase of the Quint fire truck, an aerial firefighting apparatus with ladder capabilities, for a total cost of $752,000. The article’s petitioner was Selectman Marie Angelides.
Funds for the Quint were derived from $90,000 donated by
Bay Path University,
Jewish Geriatric Services, and
Glenmeadow Retirement Community during the course of several years. A total of $325,000 came from a fire truck savings account and $425,000 was from available treasury funds.
“The truck’s cost is $739,196,” Fire Chief Eric Madison said. “That is with some equipment, however that still leaves us a little shy of in excess of $10,000 to purchase any other equipment needed for it.”
Madison told
Reminder Publications the town awarded the contract for the Quint fire truck to
Greenwood Emergency Vehicles of North Attleboro. Greenwood is a dealership of E-One products, which manufactures Quint fire trucks.
“Right now the factory is telling us the completion [is] in the middle of May,” he added. “Now sometimes they get them done early.”
The Quint fire truck has a 78-foot ladder, is a single-axle, has a 1,250-gallon per minute pump, and will be able to carry 500 gallons of water, Madison said.
“It’ll carry, for example, a 35-foot ground ladder, of which we don’t have a ground ladder that long currently,” he added. “It’ll carry a couple different, what we call, roofing ladders – designed for operating on a roof of a building.”
Town Manager Stephen Crane said a couple of days after the Nov. 18 Special Town Meeting, a representative from Greenwood told the Fire Department that E-One happened to have a unassigned 78-foot Quint ladder truck on its assembly line at that time.
“That kind of feels like fate,” Crane added. “It turned out that the truck that the citizen’s petition had asked for, they had one available.”
Madison said additional firefighter training to use the Quint truck will be completed before and after the firefighting apparatus is delivered to the Fire Department.
“I think probably once it comes in by the time we get all the equipment mounted and folks trained on it, we’re probably looking at a month from the time it’s delivered to the time [until] we’re actually using [the Quint],” he added.
A Quint fire truck isn’t too different from a regular fire engine in terms of what firefighters already know, Madison noted. However, there are operational differences such as positioning the apparatus.
"By that I mean, where you park it when you first pull up to the fire,” Madison said. “So if you park it in a position of which the ladder can’t reach or can't be easily extended to an operation that you might need and [if] you’ve [attached the hose to the hydrant, then the Quint wouldn’t be effective.]”
Some difficulties with making sure a Quint fire truck is positioned correctly include overhead obstructions such as wires or tree limbs, he noted.
Right now, a dealership is examining trade-in prices for Engine 3, he added. “Most likely we will trade it in but I’m looking financially what we can get from that.”
The town purchased Engine 3 in 1989.
“It seems like there’s always something breaking on the truck,” Madison said. “It’s just tired. Generally in a town like Longmeadow we get a good 25 years from them. It’s about due.”
The Quint fire truck will be “a tremendous benefit for the department and the community,” he added. “It's going to provide the tools that the firefighters will need to address scene priorities at structure fires. So for an example, we have a very small crew on duty at a given time. If they arrive on a scene and there’s somebody trapped and they have to perform a rescue, that’s a scene priority. Life safety’s first. Fire suppression, for example, would be secondary to that.”
