By Alan M. Petrillo
Cottleville (MO) Fire Protection District covers a sprawling 40-square-mile suburb 30 miles northwest of St. Louis with 57 paid full-time firefighters operating out of four stations, running 4,000 calls annually. The district switched over in 2002 from running a dedicated rescue truck to three rescue-pumpers and a rescue-aerial to service its 100,000-daytime population. Just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019, the district began looking to replace four rescue-pumpers and one aerial.
“We had our truck committee established prior to COVID and looked at other fleets in the St. Louis region,” says Craig Tihen, Cottleville’s assistant chief. “Our rigs are set up to handle rescue situations, carrying struts, air bags, hydraulic rescue tools, Stokes baskets, and high-angle rescue equipment, essentially everything that we could have done with a rescue truck.”
“We talked with departments that had E-ONE, Pierce, and Rosenbauer fleets, getting information about their apparatus and the maintenance of them,” he says. “Ultimately, we went to H-GAC (the Houston-Galveston Area Council cooperative purchasing program) and bought four Pierce PUC pumpers and one Pierce Ascendant 110-foot aerial platform.”
Tihen notes that his district has a lot of subdivisions with narrow, tight streets, so the department wanted a pumper with a shorter wheelbase than their existing rigs, and got that shorter wheelbase with PUC pumpers without sacrificing storage space. “We also were concerned about the hose bed height for our large diameter hose (LDH) and wanted water tank capacity of at least 650 gallons. Pierce was able to keep the hose bed low and give us a 700-gallon water tank.”
Cottleville (MO) Fire Protection District purchased four Pierce Manufacturing PUC rescue-pumpers that gave the district the short wheelbase it was seeking without compromising storage space on the rigs. (Photos courtesy of Cottleville Fire Protection District.)Andy Klein, Missouri sales manager for MacQueen Emergency, who sold the rigs to Cottleville, says the four rescue-pumpers are built on a Pierce Velocity chassis, powered by a 525-horsepower (hp) Detroit Diesel DD13 engine, and an Allison 4500 EVS automatic transmission, with TAK-4™ independent front suspension, and side roll and frontal impact protection, carrying a PUC™ 1,500-gallons-per-minute (gpm) single-stage pump, and a 700-ga