Finn said he is working with the city’s lawyer to file a lawsuit against Navistar International, the company that created the MaxxForce engines inside some of the department’s vehicles.

“There’s 47 lawsuits across the country attributed to this engine and a number of class-action lawsuits and we’re going to be joining that,” Finn said 
last night.

“They make up about 35 percent of our fleet and they’re taking up about 80 percent of our service and maintenance time,” he said.

“We are going to be filing our own single-action lawsuit and we’re working with the city’s attorney on how we can best approach that.”

Finn’s comments came on the heels of a 77-page National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health report that found inadequate wind-driven fire training, subpar staffing and poor tactical decisions contributed to Walsh and Kennedy’s deaths.

"I've been around the medical field all my life and my mom is an LPN," said Smith. "I just want to help out in my community and better serve it."

Smith's teacher, Jodi Shirey, tries to give her students a realistic idea of what it takes to be an EMT.

One of the most important tools of that trade is an ambulance and now Shirey's students have one to call their own.

"When we put them in the back of an Ambulance, they're confined just like they are going to work in the real world and that's important," said Shirey.

The ambulance was donated by the Big Island Emergency Crew.

"I knew they had a vehicle that they were going to replace and I expressed interest to them," Shirey said.

The vehicle was built in 1998. It's old for emergency work but Shirey says it's in perfect shape for instructional use.

Town Manager Stephen Crane told Reminder Publications one of the greatest abilities the 78-foot Quint ladder truck gives the department is to put out fires from above with speed and efficiency.

Firefighter and Paramedic Mike Nothe said the Quint has more benefits than a regular ladder truck.

"We're able to get into a lot more tight spaces in town – small driveways,” he explained.

Firefighter and Paramedic Jason Mele said the size of the Quint is a “perfect fit” for Longmeadow.

“There’s a lot of smaller streets in town where trying to maneuver a full-size ladder truck through would be close to impossible, if not impossible,” he added. “Before we had the Quint, we had to rely on mutual aid. Both of our mutual aid ladder trucks would have had a harder time negotiating, particularly the fire on Elmwood [Avenue].”

The new Quint truck, which features a permanently mounted ladder pump that has a flow capacity of 500 to 1,000 gallons of water per minute, replaced a more than 25-year-old fire engine that was sold to a government surplus website for $6,800.