By Alan M. Petrillo
North America’s first electric fire engine, manufactured by Pierce Manufacturing Inc., has been in service at Madison (WI) Fire Department’s Station 8 for nearly three weeks and has responded to 200 calls with what the fire chief calls “flawless performance.”
Madison Fire chief Steven Davis dubbed the Pierce Volterra pumper “the coolest fire truck in the world.” He says the electric pumper, “Drives one hundred percent like a traditional pumper. It has a lot of electric torque and our drivers love how it handles and how quiet it is in the cab.”
Dave Archer, Pierce’s vice president of engineering, says the Pierce Volterra pumper is built on a Pierce Enforcer™ custom chassis and cab with seating for six firefighters. The rig is powered by a 155-kW hour battery pack, specially designed to meet Madison Station 8’s daily duty cycle, and housed in an 18-inch-wide compartment at the rear of the crew cab.
The pumper has a Cummins ISB 6.7-liter 350-horsepower (hp) diesel engine to power its 1,500-gallon per minute (gpm) pump, and to serve as a backup if the battery pack becomes depleted. Gross vehicle weight rating on the pumper is 42,000 pounds, the rig has a 500-gallon water tank, a Command Zone™ display on the pump panel and on the dash, and 150 cubic feet of compartmentation, plus ladder storage space.
The Pierce Volterra pumper built for Madison Fire is powered by a 155-kW hour battery pack, and an Oshkosh™ patented parallel-electric drive train with an electro-mechanical infinitely variable transmission.
Jim Johnson, Oshkosh Corp. executive vice president and president of Fire & Emergency, points out that the Madison electric pumper uses an Oshkosh patented parallel-electric drive train featuring an electro-mechanical infinitely variable transmission. “This allows zero emissions operation when powered by the integrated onboard batteries,” Johnson says, “and can be coupled to the Cummins diesel engine to provide continuous and uninterrupted power to the pumping system or the drive system.”
Davis notes Madison had Pierce configure the pumper’s operation “to run the pump off the diesel engine in order to simplify operation for our firefighters so they don’t have to worry about draining the battery. When the operator puts the vehicle in pump gear, the diesel automatically powers up. It also will automatically power up if the battery becomes depleted, with the switch over happening seamlessly.”
Davis says the pumper carries 500 feet of 5-inch LDH (large diameter hose), and has two 300-foot 2-1/2-inch cross lays, and one 300-foot 1-3/4-inch cross lay. “We have not had the electric pumper at a working structure fire yet, but it has extinguished some motor vehicle fires,” he points out. “On the 200 calls that we’ve responded to with this engi