Colleton County Fire-Rescue took delivery of five new fire trucks purchased from Emergency One in Ocala, Florida. The trucks are a part of an order placed a few years ago as a part of a fire bond approved by County Council five years ago. The trucks are a part of an order that also included one custom truck which is coming in December and four tenders that are supposed to be here sometime early next year.
The trucks which have a multiple year lead time to order will be replacing older trucks, some over 30 years old, that are still in the fleet.
The trucks that are built on a commercial Kenworth truck chassis and will have a larger hopper capacity, the pumps are 2000 gallon per minute, The trucks were designed with extra-large cabinets to get a lot of the heavier equipment down lower. The ladders are also stored inside the truck. Thy are about shoulder height so you can just pull them straight off the vehicle putting a lot less wear and tear on the firefighters themselves.
The addition to the new truck will allow standardization to Kenworth, which will improve efficiency when servicing the truck and allowing fire personnel to train on similar units.
The Fire-Rescue Ambulances are also on a Kenworth chassis and are expected in September of next year. The are manufactured by Wheeled Coach and are running about 20 months behind on the production schedule. Fire-Rescue is now able to remount the ambulance body on a new chassis which will save around 100,000 per vehicle.
Colleton Fire-Rescue Chief Barry McRoy added that the are also standardizing the water tenders. He says, “There’s 34 fire stations within Colleton County to cover a total of 132 square miles. The county is the size of the state of Rhode Island. The ability to move water is critical. There is not another county in the state of South Carolina that can hold water that we can transport. Another thing that we did 25 years ago was standardized the tender fleet to be they’re all the same size. When you get to a fire and you’re having to shuttle water from a pond or stream somewhere, at some point, those trucks start backing up because the smaller truck fills up quicker and dumps quicker. But the big trucks like 4000- or 5000-gallon ones they take longer to fill, shuttle, and dump.
McRoy says that Fire-Rescue is always looking for volunteers and remember if you see an emergency vehicle approaching pull to the right side of the road.
For more information visit https://colletonfire.com
