The Merrill Fire Department welcomed the arrival of a long awaited upgrade to their apparatus fleet, in the form of a 2017 Ford F550 Brush Truck. The vehicle comes as a replacement for the department's current apparatus, a 22-year-old truck which is no longer capable of adequately serving its purpose.
According to Fire Chief Dave Savone, the F550 chassis was purchased locally from Breaman Ford of Merrill and was then sent down to 1st Attack Engineering of Waterloo, Ind., to be outfitted to fulfill its purpose of fighting wildland fires, such as grass and forest fires.
Some of the features the truck has been equipped with include 4Ã4 capability, a 350-gallon water tank with a pump system capable of a 200 gallon per minute (GPM) output, as well as the capability of drafting water to refill the tank from a secondary water source such as a lake or pond.