Texas A&M Forest Service Resource Specialist Jason Calvet said the equipment is a huge benefit to the department, their community and surrounding area.

"The jaws unit is replacing an old 1994 unit," Punkin-Evergreen VFD Chief Rick Stevens said. "Highway 150 is our main source of accidents because it gets a lot of traffic. We also mutual aid with other departments for 18-wheeler accidents."

The new Jaws of Life has already been used four times since being put into service.

Chief Stevens is glad to have these increased capabilities for his department. "We have responded to a variety of critical calls in our community including swift water rescue, aircraft crash, fires and vehicle accidents," Chief Stevens said. "In 2017 the Boy Scouts of America will be opening a 4,000-acre camp with a large lake in our service area. We want to be prepared with training and equipment, should the need arise."

In 2014 and 2015, fires that spread to roughly 300,000 acres in north-central Washington broke previously held records for that state. The blaze in 2014 destroyed several communities and caused trestle and track damage to short line Cascade & Columbia River Railroad. Other fires have led to closures of BNSF and Union Pacific main lines in Washington, Idaho and Montana, and prompted the deployment of firefighting resources throughout the region.

Measured individually, these recent wildfires were smaller than some recorded in prior decades. Burn complexes of 3 million acres or more struck the mountains of British Columbia and Alberta in 1950, Idaho and Montana in 1910, and New Brunswick in 1825. A cross section taken from an ancient Ponderosa pine in western Montana revealed scars from no less than 20 fires dating clear back to 1612, all but one of them occurring prior to 1892. The potential for wildfires to damage railway property and disrupt service has been around since the first locomotives breathed steam.