Mona Darwish
The Orange County Register
(TNS)

More than $265,000 has been raised so far for the firefighters injured when their truck overturned on an Orange County toll road last week, with contributions from Southern California hotshot crews, firefighter and police unions and others.

• Eight Firefighters Injured in Fire Truck Rollover on Southern CA Freeway

The crash occurred on the evening of Sept. 19, north of the Portola Parkway exit on the northbound 241 Toll Road. Eight members of the Orange County Fire Authority’s Santiago hand crew were headed back to their command post in a transport truck, following a 12-hour shift battling the over-23,000 acre Airport fire in the Cleveland National Forest area.

For reasons under investigation, the driver lost control and struck a metal guard rail, causing the truck to overturn and roll over several times before it landed on its side. Six of the eight injured crew members, who ranged between the ages of 24 to 34, suffered serious injuries.

As of Tuesday, Sep. 24, four critically injured members remained hospitalized, officials said. They were expected to remain in the hospital for “quite a while,” OCFA Fire Chief Brian Fennessy said in a news conference last week.

A relief fund for the eight affected firefighters and their families was set up by the OCFA and its union, with a fundraising goal of $500,000. The money raised will help with medical costs not covered by insurance, caregiver fees and other supplemental expenses they will incur “on the long road to recovery,”  said Orange County Professional Firefighters Association, Local 3631 President Chris Hamm.

“We drive the same kind of buggy, we do the same work they do… I’m sure they would have done the same for us,” said Patrick Fearon, a foreman at Los Angeles County’s Fire Camp 8 in Malibu. Fearon and close to 30 other hand-crew members made a group contribution of $2,000, with each individual pitching in what they could.

Over $265,000 total had been raised as of Tuesday, with roughly $236,000 in donations from a GoFundMe and a little over $30,000 through PayPal. Donors included hotshot crews and firefighter unions based in Los Angeles County, the Inland Empire, and even as far as Sacramento and Vacaville. So far, the single largest donation came from the San Bernardino County Professional Firefighters Local 935, which gave $15,000.

“It’s a tragic incident. Anything we can do to help our brothers and sisters in Orange County, we always will,” IAFF Local 935 President Jim Gregoli said.

Some local police unions also showed support, including the police associations of Garden Grove, Huntington Beach and Seal Beach. Garden Grove Police Association President Brian Stroud described the relationship between police and firefighters as a special brotherhood, with a long history of both agencies being there for each other. When he was injured in the line of duty, OCFA was there for him.

“We’ve been there to help them and they’ve been there for us. If one of them goes down, we feel the pain as well,” Stroud said.

Hyundai Motor Group recently announced plans to develop a firefighting robot to handle electric vehicle fires that occur in underground parking lots, the Bahrain News Agency reported.

The Korean automotive group announced it will coordinate with the National Fire Agency of the Republic of Korea to develop the firefighting robots by the end of the year and deploy them for use starting in 2026, Yonhap News Agency reported.

The firefighting robot will be equipped with a 65-mm water cannon, a thermal imaging camera, and a spray device, with the multipurpose unmanned vehicle as the basis, as requested by the National Fire Agency, kedglobal.com reported.

The robot is expected to allow remote-controlled fire suppression, providing an effective solution for fires in underground facilities, where it is difficult or dangerous for firefighters to enter, the group said.

Hyundai Motor Group expressed its intention to provide firefighting equipment to the government through the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy in August.

Lydia Snow
Elko Daily Free Press, Nev.
(TNS)

Sep. 26—ELKO — Community development money from Elko County is funding new fire station buildings in the rural areas of Osino and Deeth.

Built from a grant model, the Ryndon Station 127 volunteer firehouse in Osino is “about 75% complete,” Ryndon Volunteer Fire Department Assistant Chief Cody Allen said.

“We had $1.1 million in grant funds available to us. So we split it down the middle,” with the Ryndon VFD receiving about half and the Deeth VFD getting the other half, he said.

“We have seen no opposition from the community members of Osino on our location or purpose. We rezoned, picked our contractors and got to work,” he said.

“We’re an all-risk volunteer fire department. So, we run medical calls. We run community assist, lost children, lift assists. We help with, say, hospice care, if they need help getting somebody moved in and around the house. We have EMTs and paramedics on our service as well. So we run everything from a sick kid to a major traumatic injury to car wrecks,” Allen said.

“The majority of our calls, though, are generally medical calls and then wildland fire. Our jurisdiction runs from city limits out to the River Ranch exit at mile marker 328 and then that’s where the fire department picks up. They run from there to Wells.” The Ryndon VFD covers many parts of Elko’s outskirts, including Interstate 80 and the railways, he said.

Allen said construction on the new building is going smoothly.

“There were some engineering obstacles we had to work our way through early in the process, with us being the first firehouse being built off his grant and not really having a true understanding of what the county was going to require as part of the special use permit,” he said.

“Theoretically, it’s a commercial building — but it’s an unoccupied commercial building in a residential area to serve public needs, so there’s a lot of gray area on code and different things like that. But I think we’ve worked all the kinks out.”

Deeth Station 33

The Ryndon fire station is the first to be built on the grant. Deeth VFD Chief Dale Lotspeich explained how his station, the second one under the grant, will be a boon for the department.

“Our current fire station is in the floodplain. During high-water years, the Marys River floods Deeth and our station is flooded. They’ve tried building a berm around it and trying to do everything they could to try and mitigate the water flow,” he explained.

“Our station’s been flooded, out of the last 20 years, at least a dozen times,” Lotspeich noted. It originated as a Nevada Department of Wildlife maintenance station built in the 1940s. Since the building was used for little other than storing vehicles, it didn’t contain any protective features like insulation.

“The building is really inefficient,” Lotspeich said. “It’s in massive disrepair, just from a standpoint of loose siding and boards that are rotting and that sort of thing. So it’s time for a new station.”

But, as is often the case, money was an obstacle.

“When the county took over, funding was an issue. So, this last year, when they came up with the funding, they prioritized the Deeth station and the Osino station and asked us to apply for the grant, which we did. We were granted, and we were able to find a contractor who could build it within the confines of the budget,” Lotspeich said.

“The decision was made to move with the Osino station first, since they were in the pr

Nicky Andrews
Colorado Hometown Weekly
(TNS)

Sep. 27—Move over folks, a bigger and better Boulder County HazMat truck, measuring 30 feet long and 13 feet high, is hitting the streets next month.

The just over $1 million custom apparatus includes a command center, a 45-foot high telescope camera with a 2-mile zoom, two TVs, computers, retractable awnings, counter space and storage, a bathroom, a sink, a mini-fridge and a microwave. SVI Trucks, a custom fire truck maker in Fort Collins, made the one-of-a-kind truck.

Boulder County HazMat Team coordinator and Fire Lieutenant Stew Visser said the new apparatus replaces a 24-year-old truck that was owned by Longmont Fire before it was donated to the hazmat team.

“We’re just upgrading and getting more space and new bells and whistles,” Visser said.

“The new truck is much larger,” Visser said. “It has a command area, so for large incidents they can bring in a number of people for a unified command.”

The Boulder County HazMat team is composed of 100 hazmat technicians from across the county who investigate and mitigate threats posed by hazardous materials, including chemicals; toxic substances; gasses; explosives; flammable materials; weapons of mass destruction; suspicious substances; and radioactive contamination, according to the hazmat team’s spokesperson Shawn Stark, who also is a Louisville EMS captain and paramedic.

The team is its own government agency. Visser said on average, the entire team is called out to help a few times a year, but the individual fire departments respond to smaller hazmat incidents multiple times a month.

There are five other hazmat “rigs,” or vehicles, as well as an ambulance that respond with the entire team, Visser wrote in an email.

Boulder County HazMat Response Authority Board President Dan Higgins, who is also the chief of Longmont Fire Department, said these other vehicles can allow responders to travel between the scene of a hazardous material and the apparatus truck.

“You can always establish this vehicle on a main road and then we do have smaller vehicles that we can take closer, if we needed to,” Higgins said. “The thing about HazMat is you don’t always want to be right on top of the scene. You may need some distance anyway for safety and to stay out of the hazardous environment with your main response vehicle.”

Higgins said the truck will provide a better area for team members to do their work and be more accommodating to different weather conditions. Higgins explained that HazMat work requires a lot of planning and research and a lot of time is spent on the scene.

“Hazmat calls are usually a fairly extended timeframe, about six to eight hours,” Visser said. “Things slow down quite a bit when you deal with hazmat.”

Visser explained that he once was on a scene for 36 hours and the new truck’s bathroom, micr