Viewer Tim Diener sent WLWT a video from the Clifton area showing a fire truck descend an icy hill. It happened around 12:30 a.m. on Euclid Avenue.

The fire truck slid on the icy slope and plowed into several vehicles parked along the road.

Using the truck that is being replaced, firefighters and other onlookers, including village leaders in attendance, on Dec. 6 hosed down the new truck that was to start its duty at Skokie Fire Station 16 on Niles Center Road. One by one, they took turns giving the shiny truck a shot from the water-charged hose from the outgoing truck before drying it off. Then several firefighters pushed the truck — well, simulated pushing the truck so as not to cause hernias, Walters joked — into the station to begin its run.

The new rig isn't any old truck, Walters said. Even the firehouse itself had to be prepared for the addition.

"These stations are 50 years old and the rigs were a lot smaller at one time," he said. Firefighters used to ride on the tail boards, after which cabs and then enclosed cabs were built onto trucks for safety reasons so they became longer and higher.

According to fire officials, the new truck measures 11.8 feet high and 47.6 feet long with the basket.

Fire officials after the ceremony showed off the new truck and some of its state-of-the-art equipment on board. There is much more storage than in other trucks, they said. Hydraulic rescue tools — also known as Jaws of Life — are now battery-operated and technologically advanced.

"One of the reasons why I came back to the Fire Department from a very happy retirement was that it's a great place to work," he told 1010 WINS. "Certainly not an easy job -- and we know it's a dangerous job -- but it's very fulfilling. You get a chance to make a difference every day -- and our people do make a difference every day -- and at the end of every day they go home satisfied, go home knowing that what they did was something that made a difference."

Nigro said the FDNY sets the standards for other departments across the nation.

"Not only are we the biggest in this country and the busiest, but we're the fire department that others look to for innovation," Nigro said. "We take pride in being the leaders in this profession."

Google was ranked the overall best employer, followed by Costco, according to Forbes.

In 1999, six career firefighters lost their lives responding to a five-alarm fire. They were part of a group of 73 dispatched to a smoke-filled warehouse in Worcester, Massachusetts. Lost inside the building's tight corners, they were unable to find an exit before running out of oxygen.

Avoiding a tragedy like that has been a technical challenge for decades. In the outdoors, firefighters can use GPS to track one another, and radios to stay in communication. But when they move into a steel and concrete building, these technologies suddenly become unreliable.

A research team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has developed a tracking system that could be a game-changer for firefighter safety. The team has been demonstrating the system, called POINTER (Precision Outdoor and Indoor Navigation and Tracking for Emergency Responders), for national and regional leaders in the first-responder community. The tracking technology could also benefit search-and-rescue teams in industrial or military contexts.

In August, POINTER was successfully demonstrated for top leadership at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate, which has funded its development.

"To this day, the ability to track and locate first responders is a number one priority for disaster agencies across the country," said Greg Price, DHS First Responder Technologies Division director. "It's truly a Holy Grail capability that doesn't exist today. If the POINTER project continues along its current path of success, first responders will be safer in the future." Price observed the demo, along with DHS Under Secretary for Science and Technology Reginald Brothers and Deputy Under Secretary Robert Griffin. In September, representatives from fire departments across the U.S. visited JPL for a demonstration of POINTER. The tracking challenge was top of mind for Andrew Wordin, a battalion chief with the Los Angeles Fire Department: just weeks before, a firefighter became lost in a building after a roof gave way under him.

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