The fire department has a new engine for Station 3, located on Piney Forest Road. The new engine will replace the current one, which was made back in 1996. Assistant Fire Chief Mike Jefferson says the new engine should significantly reduce maintenance and repair costs. “[With] older vehicles, you have more maintenance and stuff,” Jefferson pointed out. “We shouldn’t have as much maintenance on this truck. It’s actually bigger. We have more compartment space, we can carry more equipment. We can put people in the back without being as cramped as they were in the other truck.”

Louis and Joyce Farris filed a lawsuit April 13 in Kanawha Circuit Court against the city of Charleston and Joseph Schafer, alleging negligence and loss of consortium.

According to the complaint, as Louis Farris crossed the intersection of Seventh and 26th streets in Charleston on Sept. 17, 2014, he was struck by a city of Charleston fire truck Schafer was operating. The suit says a crash report filled out at the time of the accident acknowledges that Schafer ran a red light, causing the accident. Farris’s injuries included rib fractures, a collapsed lung, cuts, bruises and a broken right leg.

Police were investigating a crash Monday evening between an Orange County Fire Authority ladder truck and an SUV in Buena Park.

The crash happened shortly before 6:55 p.m. at the intersection of Western Avenue and Fillmore Drive, according to OCFA Capt. Larry Kurtz. The truck was heading to a structure fire with its lights and sirens on when the crash occurred.

The four firefighters on the truck were uninjured and the female driver of the Cadillac Escalade, a woman in her late 20s, was taken to UCI Medical Center with moderate, non-life-threatening injuries, Kurtz said.

“Upon initially arriving on scene, I was able to speak with the fire fighters who stated that they were okay and after speaking with the fire fighters they pointed to a male who was walking around the truck [Ryan Stanek],” an incident report states.

Ryan told officers he did not know how or why he had hit the fire truck, and said that he'd been “traveling forward and that because the fire truck was slightly impeding the lane of traffic in which he was driving, he had hit it.”

The incident report states Ryan provided no information regarding what he was doing at the time he was driving and struck the Brooklyn Center fire truck, which was about to leave the scene of a previous call.