The Oneida Daily Dispatch (Oneida, NY)
Truck repairs, gear updates help fortify department
ONEIDA, N.Y. » The Oneida Fire Department is gearing up for the new year with upgrades, refurbishments and training.
“We’ve got a lot done over the last few years,” Fire Chief Kevin Salerno said. “The city really stepped up for public safety and for us. We were fortunate to get some grants in the past few years to replace a lot of gear.”
Old and out-dated equipment has been steadily replaced over the last few years, including the department’s turn-out gear and self-contained breathing apparatus. The city also bought a new rescue truck and pump truck, and the department’s ladder truck is out for refurbishment.
“The department is only as good as the equipment they got,” Salerno said. “I mean, if the city wants, we’ll run upwith a five gallon bucket of water and put out fires, but that’s hardly fire protection.”
Salerno said the department has filed for a Assistance to Firefighters Grant through FEMA to replace the department’s aged cascade system, the machine responsible for filling air bottles. While the system isn’t broken, it is 20 years old, and it’s having trouble keeping upwith the needed pressure to fill air packs.
According to Lt. Scott Jones who heads the SCBA division, the current cascade system barely outputs enough pressure to fill air bottles to capacity.
“We’ve had some minimum maintenance and repairs we’ve had to do to the cascade system, but it’s definitely showing its age,” Jones said. “We’ve updated the fill station in recent years, so this is the final piece to push us into the future.”
When it comes to the department’s ladder truck, a refurbishment was the more economical option rather a complete replacement.
Head mechanic Lt. Jeff White said initial estimates for refurbishing the ladder truck were about $400,000, but until the truck was in the shop and completely taken apart, they wouldn’t know for sure.
“It’s difficult because of the size of the truck and the moving parts,” White said. “They send out a representative from Sutphen, the company that made the truck, and that’s where they got the estimate.”
According to White, to replace the ladder truck with a brand new one would cost the city about $1.4 million.
The ladder truck is suffering from general wear and tear from use over the years and that’s something that couldn’t be avoided, no matter how well the department treated it, White said.
“There’s four parts to that ladder that move in and out,” White said. “It has a lot of parts that telescope in and out. Cables, pulleys, slide blocks and things like that. Those all wear out over time and when they do, they’re not easily replaced. You have to take the whole ladder apart.”
To ensure the safety of the firefighters who use the truck, Sutphen leaves no stone unturned and completely disassembles sections of the truck, looking over any parts that could be suffering from age, such as hoses and hydraulics, White said.
On top of that, White said Sutphen is updating parts of the ladder truck so they’re up to code with National Fire Protection, whether it to be seat belts or air bags.
“When Sutphen is done with the truck, even though it’s over 20 years old, it’ll have the safety features of a 2018 truck,” White said.
The ladder truck went out in November and when service is finished, the life of the truck will be extended by around 15 years.
And while the fire department is updating gear and equipment, firefighters will soon have the ability to get the kind of training they didn’t have before.
“The county is just about ready to open a new training center in Lincoln, the first of its kind the area,” Salerno said. “The fire department will have a building that we can light fires in and train. It’s specialized to train people with actual fires. It’s one thing to look at it on a TV, and try to train it in a classroom, but to actually do it? We’ve never had that ability in the county.”
The new building will be multi-purpose, training not just firefighters, but police officers as well.
With Salerno retiring by year’s end, 2018 will prove to be a year of changes for the department.
Salerno’s successor will come from inside the department and final say rests with Public Safety Commissioner Mike West and Mayor Leo Matzke. Salerno said he’ll submit the top three candidates from his ranks after their civil service test results come back. Eight firefighters were eligible to take the test this year, Salerno said. Those results should be back sometime in March or April.
“I’ve been very fortunate to have a mayor and a council that works with me and understands the needs to provide fire protection to the city,” Salerno said.