According to a report from The State-Journal Register, a proposed ordinance set to be approved by the Springfield, Illinois, City Council on Tuesday would take out multiple loans from JP Morgan Chase Bank totaling $5.5 million to purchase vehicles for several city agencies, which will include a truck for the Springfield Fire Department (SFD), among other items.

SFD Deputy Division Chief Mike Abbott said that, if approved, the order will take more than a year to build because of international metal and chip shortages.

The order also includes 11 Zoll X Series defibrillators, which will give the SFD a total of 20 at its disposal. The SFD is currently phasing out its Phillips MRx defibrillators that were purchased in 2005 and which are no longer supported by the manufacturer.

The new defibrillators cost $34,000 each and feature improved detection systems for carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, among other improvements. Abbott said the department must be trained on just one type of defibrillator, which prompted the need for a full set of Zolls.

Springfield budget director Bill McCarty said the city regularly takes out a loan every two to four years to purchase vehicles in bulk, which is being aided by current low interest rates.

One five-year-loan will total $1.85 million and is expected to produce annual principal interest payments of $383,087. The other is a $3.665 million seven-year-loan with projected principal and interest payments of $548,359, according to the proposed ordinance. Payments on both will begin June 2022.

The Oakland (CA) Fire Department’s Station 25 was closed over the weekend due to a malfunctioning water heater, and crews were relocated to a nearby station, reports the sfchronicle.com.

Officials say Station 25’s four firefighters were relocated to Station 24, which is 1.9 miles away. The closure came a day after a Red Flag Warning took effect in the area.

Station 25 is located at 2795 Butters Dr., next to Joaquin Miller Park.

By Alan M. Petrillo

The Tucson (AZ) Fire Department staffs 22 fire stations 24/7 with paid, full-time firefighters providing fire suppression, rescue, and emergency medical services (EMS) to a population of 520,116 in a city of 240 square miles in the heart of the Sonoran Desert. The department runs 22 Type 1 engines, eight ladder companies of which three are quints, four ladder tenders, one water tender (tanker), two hazmat trucks, one technical rescue truck, a rehab rig, two rapid-response team trucks for disaster response, a mass casualty response truck, and four Type 6 wildland trucks.

The department received a recommendation from the National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG) noting that Tucson Fire should have at least one and preferably two Type 3 engines in its fleet, based on the area’s terrain and wildland fire loading. Paul Moore, Tucson Fire’s deputy chief of logistics, says that as an all-hazards fire department, Tucson wanted to expand its wildland firefighting capability and followed up on NWCG’s recommendation of purchasing a Type 3 rig. “The Type 3 is the best suited for wildland urban interface firefighting, which is what we have here,” Moore notes. “We also have four Type 6 engines in our fleet, two of which are staffed 24/7 and two not staffed.”

Chris Callies, Southwest sales manager for Hughes Fire Equipment, who sold the Type 3 engine to Tucson, says the department has been a Pierce Manufacturing fleet customer for a number of years. “They approached us last year and told us they needed to bolster their wildland firefighting capability and wanted to see what we had available in a Type 3 engine,” Callies says. “We had a Pierce FX3 Type 3 stock unit on hand, so they took the time to go over the rig, liked what they saw, and purchased it.”

The Pierce FX3 Type 3 engine is built on a Freightliner M2-104 4×4 commercial chassis and four-door cab with seating for five firefighters, Callies points out. Wheelbase on the Type 3 is 177 inches, and gross vehicle weight rating (GVWR) is 35,000 pounds. The rig has a Darley JMP500 500-gallons-per-minute (gpm) two-stage PTO (power takeoff) drive midship pump, a Darley 1-1/2-AGE 150-gpm hydraulic PTO pump for pump-and-roll operations, a Husky 3 single agent foam system, a 500-gallon water tank, and a 20-gallon foam tank.

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