By Raul A. Angulo
One of the signs I knew it was time to retire was my inability to confidently balance myself on a pitched roof. As a truck captain, my job was to supervise the rooftop ventilation operation.
I tried to be the first or second firefighter up on the roof with the thermal imaging camera to identify the best place to cut the ventilation hole, then I got out of the way so my crew could make the roof cuts. Nevertheless, I still found myself burying my pickhead ax into the roof decking just so I could have something to hold onto because I didn’t want to fall. On one of my last fires where we ended up on the roof in the middle of the night, not only did I bury my pickhead ax into the roof, but I also used my bailout hook and rope, found another anchor point, and used my rope as a tether so I had a second point of contact to hold onto. I realized after 37 years on the job that I was no longer a Billy goat. When you’re more concerned about falling off the roof than opening it, it’s probably time to get off the truck.
1 The R.O.S. is a working platform that attaches to any standard aluminum roof ladder. It is made of ¼-inch aluminum diamond plate and is 48 inches long, 11 inches wide, and five inches thick. It nestles inline inside the roof ladder between the rungs and the beams. You carry and set in place the roof ladder as normal until you need the R.O.S. Platform. (Photos 1-4 by author.)
According to Don Abbott’s Project Mayday, the number-one reason firefighters call a Mayday is from falling into a basement. Number two is falling through a roof. Most Maydays occur around the 20-minute mark of the incident. In fact, at the time of this writing in my own department, a Seattle firefighter fell through a roof into the attic space after the vertical ventilation evolution. The engine crew managed to get a hoseline into the burning attic and knocked down the fire just seconds before the firefighter fell through the roof. He was very lucky and fortunately sustained only minor injuries. The incident happened in the first 20 minutes of the house fire.
These statistics have prompted numerous inventors, many of whom are active firefighters, to look for solutions to these problems. Lieutenants Bill McCarthy and Derron Suchodolski are career firefighters with the Saginaw (MI) Fire Department. They invented the Roof Operations Safety (R.O.S.) Platform and formed the company Practical Fire Equipment, LLC.
2 The R.O.S. is turned perpendicular to the roof ladder and reattached to
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Posted: Nov 1, 2018
By Alan M. Petrillo
At one time, swing-out or swing-up doors were practically the only type that could be found on the majority of fire apparatus. But these days, roll-up doors seem to have eclipsed the use of swing-outs and have become nearly standard equipment, showing up in nearly every location possible on a fire truck.
Terry Bay, applications engineer for ROM Corporation, notes that ROM brought the manufacture of roll-up doors to North America in 1988 and estimates that 70 percent of all fire apparatus are now using roll-up doors. “The main advantage to roll-up doors is safety,” Bay says. “If the vehicle has hinged doors and they are open, a firefighter doesn’t have a clear view of the complete side of the truck. And, when at a motor vehicle accident scene on a highway with concrete barriers, if the truck is up against the divider it could be difficult to open a hinged door.”
1 ROM Corporation makes the Series IV shutter doors with double-walled aluminum extrusion slats, steel springs, and spring-loaded rollers. (Photos 1-4 courtesy of ROM Corporation.) 2 This curved track roll-up door built by ROM protects a top-mount pump panel. 3 This view shows the curved side rail track on a ROM roll-up door covering a top-mount pump panel. 4 ROM also makes angled roll-up doors for fire apparatus.
Cory Eckdahl, engineering manager of metal products for Gortite, which is owned by Dynatect, agrees that roll-up doors provide a greater measure of safety for firefighters than swing-out doors. “In an emergency setting, the swing-out doors can jut out into traffic and firefighters have to go around them,” Eckdahl says, “but not so with roll-up doors because roll-up doors do not increase the footprint of the truck. And, roll-up doors are lighter than swing-out doors, and everyone knows that every pound counts on a fire truck.”
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Posted: Nov 1, 2018
By Alan M. Petrillo
At one time, swing-out or swing-up doors were practically the only type that could be found on the majority of fire apparatus. But these days, roll-up doors seem to have eclipsed the use of swing-outs and have become nearly standard equipment, showing up in nearly every location possible on a fire truck.
Terry Bay, applications engineer for ROM Corporation, notes that ROM brought the manufacture of roll-up doors to North America in 1988 and estimates that 70 percent of all fire apparatus are now using roll-up doors. “The main advantage to roll-up doors is safety,” Bay says. “If the vehicle has hinged doors and they are open, a firefighter doesn’t have a clear view of the complete side of the truck. And, when at a motor vehicle accident scene on a highway with concrete barriers, if the truck is up against the divider it could be difficult to open a hinged door.”
1 ROM Corporation makes the Series IV shutter doors with double-walled aluminum extrusion slats, steel springs, and spring-loaded rollers. (Photos 1-4 courtesy of ROM Corporation.) 2 This curved track roll-up door built by ROM protects a top-mount pump panel. 3 This view shows the curved side rail track on a ROM roll-up door covering a top-mount pump panel. 4 ROM also makes angled roll-up doors for fire apparatus.
Cory Eckdahl, engineering manager of metal products for Gortite, which is owned by Dynatect, agrees that roll-up doors provide a greater measure of safety for firefighters than swing-out doors. “In an emergency setting, the swing-out doors can jut out into traffic and firefighters have to go around them,” Eckdahl says, “but not so with roll-up doors because roll-up doors do not increase the footprint of the truck. And, roll-up doors are lighter than swing-out doors, and everyone knows that every pound counts on a fire truck.”
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Posted: Nov 1, 2018
BY BILL ADAMS
Mike Mikoola’s business affiliation with the Oshkosh Corporation started 50 years ago—about the same time Oshkosh developed a working relationship with Pierce Manufacturing Company.
The links between Oshkosh and Pierce, between Mikoola and Oshkosh, and between Mikoola and Pierce are explained to provide clarity to the Global story. Seemingly separate paths at first, the three links are parallel in nature, coalescing in 2001 when Mikoola purchased an Illinois company called Global Emergency Products. Today, Global is the authorized dealer for Pierce fire apparatus in Illinois and Indiana. This article describes Global’s journey.
OSHKOSH AND PIERCE
Oshkosh’s roots can be traced back to 1917 when the company was expressly formed to manufacture heavy-duty four-wheel-drive trucks. It still does today. Within today’s municipal fire service, the Oshkosh corporation is predominantly known as the parent company of Pierce. Oshkosh’s actual entry into building fire apparatus started in 1953 when it delivered an aircraft rescue and firefighting (ARFF) rig to the United States Coast Guard.
1 This 40,000-square-foot facility in Aurora, Illinois, is the corporate headquarters for both Temco Machinery and Global Emergency Products. (Photos courtesy of Gobal Emergency Products.) 2 The Aurora, Illinois, facility has 18 service bays to support the Pierce product line in the Metro Chicago, Illinois, area.
Oshkosh and Pierce had a dual working relationship that started back in the 1970s. According to Tom Shand, a well-known source of fire apparatus history, Oshkosh developed a low-profile cab and chassis that Pierce used extensively to mount articulating boom aerial devices (aka snorkels) to keep the rigs’ overall height low. He also mentioned that Oshkosh was one of the outside vendors that supplied the running gear for the Arrow cab when it was first introduced. From Larry Shapiro’s book, Pumpers—Workhorse Fire Engines, “Built on a chassis that was originally constructed by Oshkosh, the Pierce Arrow designation referred to both the body and the cab. It became extremely popular.” It remains so. Pierce started building the complete Arrow chassis in-house in the early 1980s. Oshkosh purchased Pierce in 1996, cementing their established business association with each other.
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