HSFD acquires new truck
The newest addition to the Hot Springs Fire Department’s arsenal of firefighting equipment will help make downtown Hot Springs safer.
The department has purchased a Pierce 1,500- gallon- per- minute pumper, which will be housed at the Central Fire Station.
During the first minute on a fire scene, the pumper can immediately begin to flow 500 gpm, and reach 1,350 gpm within the first three min-
utes, Hot Springs Fire Chief Ed Davis said Thursday.
“It’s designed to put a lot of water on the fire very quickly. We set this truck up to basically be a downtown truck. It has a 1,750- gpm pump on it. If you set the truck up on a lake, it could suck that amount of water out of the lake. When operated off a fire hydrant, we should be able to get 2,000 gpm out of it,” he said.
“We could take one truck and put it on a major fire downtown, and it could put out that much water with a hydrant system.”
Davis said the pumper has seven pre- connected hose lines that can be deployed, and the nozzles chosen for the truck can be handled by one person safely.
“When you deploy a lot of nozzles, it takes a lot of people. We specified a TFT BLITZ on one of the pre- connects, which is designed to flow 500 gpm and allow one man to manage it. So we’re maximizing the punch we can put on a fire with the minimal amount of manpower we have on the pumpers,” he said.
And, with personnel costs being one of the biggest problems facing any city department, Davis said getting more “bang for the buck” greatly expands the department’s ability to fight fires with a limited number of personnel.
“We’re going to flow the maximum amount of water with just a few people,” Davis said. The truck only needs a three- man crew to operate.
The pumper, the first purchased since 2004, cost about $ 536,000, Davis said.
“This truck cost a little more because we designed it for severe duty. We designed it in such a manner that there is more steel and less chrome used in it. It’s built more like a tank than anything else,” he said.
“The interior of the cab is mostly metal, not plastic. There is some vinyl for comfort, but for the most part it’s metal. We designed this where we wouldn’t have a problem with the interior of the truck deteriorating like we have had with some of the other trucks we’ve bought.
“Where we could skip chrome, we skipped chrome. The front bumper is painted steel, and there’s a lot of brushed aluminum used on the truck. We built this with a 20- to 25- year life cycle in mind.
“It’s designed less as a show piece and more as a utilitarian firefighting truck,” Davis said.
It also came equipped with all necessary auxiliary equipment.
“When we order a truck, we order all the equipment. We buy it all, and that’s another reason the price is so high,” Davis said.
The pumper being replaced will be relocated to the Lakeshore Drive fire station.