Designing and writing specifications for heavy-duty rescue squads can be very time consuming and demanding, as these rigs have a number of body requirements and components that require a lot of attention. Ensuring that the apparatus will be able to operate, properly serve the community, and last for a long time are some of the charges made by the bosses to the apparatus committee.
One of the items that will need to be addressed is what type of incidents the rescue truck will respond to and how many functions it will be required to do. Depending on your geographic area in the country and your department’s staffing model, these two are very important questions to be answered before the specification process can proceed.
In a large number of departments, these rescue trucks have to serve more than one purpose, thus forcing the apparatus committee to truly think about how the vehicle is going to be laid out and the amount of equipment that will need to be carried for each function. The two major functions are rescue/auto accidents and fireground support. Many other functions could also be added such as hazmat, technical rescue, water rescue, dive operations, and swift water. It seems today that the list could go on forever, but for this article we will just focus on the big two.
DUAL FUNCTIONS
In the dual-function unit, laying out the equipment is important. In a number of departments I have worked with on equipment layouts, their wishes were usually to have one side for fire and one side of the rig for rescue/auto accidents. While in theory this is a very understandable request, it does have its issues. Some of our vehicle rescue tools and equipment can take up a lot of room, and they can be space hogs when it comes to storing them and making them easy to deploy. So, balancing the weight of this equipment is important to the life expectancy of the unit and how it is going to ride on the road and be evenly distributed for braking on the rig.
The fire side of the equipment is usually not as heavy. It does not require that many special storage concerns. Spreading the equipment out around the rig will assist in the proper weight balancing but, as always, the operational component will need to be looked at as we do not want to have to open three compartments to get the equipment we need to do the fire job.
These combined rescue trucks are the norm for most departments and provide a balanced response to most of their incidents. They also give the community a vehicle that does not just have one purpose, thus saving a little on the number of vehicles that are in a department’s fleet. They also reduce the chance that a department has all single-use apparatus that might require a large commitment of staffing plus the chance of being out on the run rig when the next call comes in.
SINGLE-USE UNITS
The single-use rescue truck that is designed just for vehicle rescue, although not as prevalent as the combined unit, is still a rig that is built for a number of departments across the country. These rigs, depending on their size and complexity, will require a design phase that will have to take into consideration the space needed for anything from a small porta-power to large low-pressure air bags and extensive cribbing storage. Understanding the mounting and placement of the types