Alan M. Petrillo

A growing number of fire departments around the country are turning to pumper transport units as first response vehicles-rigs that can handle a first-due engine assignment or a high priority advanced life support emergency medical service (EMS) call with equal ease.

These units combine a traditional Type 1 pumper with an EMS ambulance type compartment in a marriage of firefighting and advanced life support capabilities.

The Concept

Lisa Barwick, director of product management for cab and chassis at Pierce Manufacturing, says there has been a renewed interest in certain parts of the country in running combination vehicles such as a pumper transport. "We call ours a Patient Transport model and have seen a lot of activity with departments wanting to do more with less and specifying multiple purpose vehicles," Barwick says.

Barwick says that patient stabilization and patient transport pumpers rose to popularity in the late 1990s and early 2000s but then declined in favor as fire departments turned to vehicles specified for single purposes. Most recently, Pierce has built pumper transport units for the Broward (FL) Sheriff's Office Department of Fire Rescue and five fire departments in Utah.

Pierce has built its patient-transport pumpers on both Arrow XT and Velocity chassis, Barwick notes. "Departments tend to go for the two-door cab models and put the patient area behind that with access doors on both sides, although that's at the customer's discretion," she says. "Usually there's a double door for the gurney lift on the curb side and a single door on the road side for easy access without having to go around a gurney."

Eric Froerer, chief of the Syracuse (UT) Fire Department, staffs a Pierce transport pumper, two Type 1 Horton ambulances, a Type 6 wildland engine, a Fouts Brothers water tender (tanker), and a Pierce 75-foot quint aerial ladder out of a single station with nine full-time and 17 part-time paid firefighters. The pumper transport carries a 1,500-gallon-per-minute (gpm) pump, a 500-gallon water tank, 20 gallons of foam, and a fully outfitted patient box that includes a hydraulic lift to assist firefighters in getting a patient into the box.

"We run about 800 calls a year and 80 percent of them are medical calls," Froerer says. "The Pierce transport pumper, which serves as our second-out ambulance, is a better way of providing service and still keeping the crew available while they're out on a transport run."

Froerer notes that the Pierce pumper transport is first due on most structure fires, except for commercial fire incidents, when the Pierce quint runs first. "I was skeptical at first, but the pumper transport has been a success," Froerer says. "It has proven to be effective in keeping us in service and allowing us to handle our own calls."

Chad Brown, vice president of sales and marketing for Braun Industries, says his company builds the Patriot, a patient-transport vehicle on a custom chassis like the Spartan Furion or MetroStar. Typical wheelbase for a Patriot on a MetroStar chassis is 185 inches, with an overall length of 374 inches, overall width of 98 inches, and overall height of 118½ inches. The patient module length is 170 inches, and its headroom is 73 inches.

(1) Pierce Manufacturing built this pumper transport for the Broward (FL) Sheriff's Office Department of Fire Rescue on a Velocity chassis with a 273-inch wheelbase. (Photo courtesy of Pierce Manufacturing.)

Brown sa

Alan M. Petrillo

Fire apparatus manufacturers are responding to firefighter requests for better management and placement of hose loads on apparatus, from lower crosslays and hosebeds to slide-out and pull-out trays that make extending hose and reloading it easier.

Crosslays and Speedlays

Jason Witmier, pumper and tanker product manager for KME, says many fire departments are requesting crosslay arrangements that place handlines lower than in the past. "Fire departments want them lower now, so we typically are putting them about 42 inches above the running board, which is about 56 inches off the ground," Witmier says. "That means the hose comes out right at the shoulder so the firefighter can easily take the load."

The disadvantage to a lower crosslay is that firefighters have to repack hose by sliding it into the crosslay area from each side of the vehicle. "You can't get to it from the top," Witmier notes, "so the solution is a slide-out try that is removable. It's usually held in place by a thumb latch and can be taken out of the crosslay area, put on a table or other flat area, and repacked. Some departments also purchase spare trays that they prepack with hose so they are ready to be inserted into the crosslay area after hose is used."

Witmier adds that another potential pitfall with a slide-out crosslay is that sometimes the nozzle is too big to fit into the tray. "We talk to our customers beforehand and determine what kind of nozzle they will use on their crosslays to determine if they can be deployed from each side of the slide-out tray."

Crosslays under the cab extension (the crew area) have become popular with fire departments trying to keep the vehicle's wheelbase short, Witmier points out, but such a location causes a different issue in terms of deployment. "It puts the crosslay at waist height instead of chest height," Witmier says.

(1) E-ONE offers crosslays and speedlays in several configurations, such as these stacked crosslays shown on a top-mount pumper. (Photo courtesy of E-ONE.)

Grady North, product manager for E-ONE, believes there are as many hose loads as there are fire departments. "Everyone wants something different so the hose load becomes a customized part of the truck," North says. "With preconnected hoselines, we've seen a 50/50 mix of speedlays and crosslays," North says. "The common configuration for speedlays is vertically stacked on top of each other, which helps tighten up the wheelbase, and we do a lot of double and triple speedlay setups."

Crosslays tend to be higher off the ground, North points out, typically located on top of the pump module with open tops to the beds, compared with speedlays, which are usually in front of the pump module or behind the cab.

Slide-out trays, for both crosslays and speedlays, especially those that can be accessed from each side of the vehicle, have become very popular, North says. "Our trays are fully removable and made out of either aluminum or polypropylene," he says. "A short six-foot length of hose connects to the swivel and then to the hose in the tray."

North notes there is a difference in the preconnect water source for the two types of lays. "The swivel fitting on crosslays comes up from the bottom," he says, "but with a speedlay, the swivel comes from the top of the hose compartment."

And while dual and triple crosslays and speedlays are the most common, North says he's seen much more unusual configurations. "We recently bui

Alan M. Petrillo

The town covers 36 mostly rural square miles and has 23 paid on-call firefighters working out of a single station. But, the needs of the Manitowish Waters (WI) Fire Department, go well beyond the traditional rescue truck toolbox.

"We're mostly a vacation and retirement community, but there are no hydrants in our coverage area," says Manitowish Waters chief Skip Skrobot. "And, we needed our new apparatus to be a multiuse vehicle, so it's designed as a rescue-pumper with a large water tank, almost as a triple-use truck."

(1) UST Fire Apparatus built this rescue-pumper for the Manitowish Waters (WI) Fire Department with a Hale Q-MAX 1,500-gpm pump, a 1,000-gallon water tank, a 30-gallon Class A foam tank, and a Hale CAFS Pro foam system. (Photos courtesy of UST Fire Apparatus.)

Twist of Fate

Skrobot points out that sometimes a bit of luck puts a fire department and a vehicle manufacturer together. "Last year we had a couple of firefighters working at the station and had our trucks out on the ramp when John Woltman, president of UST Fire Apparatus, drove by on the way to a fire convention," Skrobot says. "John turned around and stopped to talk with the firefighters, finding out that we were going to buy a new piece of apparatus. He told them he'd send some information and within three days we had a booklet about UST and some general specs for a rescue-pumper."

The chief notes that the UST Fire Apparatus specs were "close to what we wanted. We're a wholly owned independent fire company, a nonprofit organization incorporated in Wisconsin that sells our services to the town of Manitowish Waters. So, we went to several apparatus manufacturers to see what they could offer us in terms of a rescue-pumper."

Skrobot says that one of the considerations for going with a rescue-pumper was that the fire department has a major two-lane state road, Highway 51, running north-south through the town. "The highway has a lot of crossroads and we're out there quite a bit for rescues, so we wanted to design this vehicle with features that could address the situations we'd find on that highway," he points out.

Manitowish Waters received bids on its specs from four manufacturers and ultimately awarded the contract to UST Fire Apparatus in December 2012. The rig was delivered in June 2013.

(2) The Manitowish Waters rescue-pumper has full depth and full height compartments on the officer's side to carry preconnected extrication equipment as well as an assortment of hand tools on drop-down trays and slide-out boards.

Equipment Hauler

Mark Meaders, chief executive officer of UST, says the department wanted to carry a lot of equipment on the rescue-pumper. "They needed a lot of specialized storage space, so we designed in tool boards, slide-out trays, and custom mounts of their extrication equipment so it was easy to access," Meaders says. "Everything was mounted in such a way to save space and maximize the ease of use."

Woltman says the job was all about meeting the requirements of the fire department. "They provided us with a minimum list of equipment they wanted carried on the truck and we exceeded it in every instance," he says. "Also, they wanted to carry a pumper's ground

Alan R. Earls

The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) is an international nonprofit organization established more than a century ago with, according to the organization, a focus on improving fire safety and combating other hazards by helping support the development of consensus-based codes and standards as well as through research, training, and education. According to the NFPA, it maintains some 300 codes and standards through the efforts of more than 200 committees encompassing about 6,000 individuals.

However, the breadth and quantity of NFPA's "products" sometimes obscure how the process works. Sometimes, it is unclear who votes on standards and how they are developed-or even what a consensus standard is. Ken Willett, head of public fire protection at NFPA, acknowledges that "a lot of users of our standards look at the finished documents and question how they ended up looking like that." Indeed, he says, it is not uncommon for people to read a revised standard and "feel sure" that they see the work or influence of a particular entity, such as a manufacturer or a firefighter's organization. Or, he notes, "They may feel that the process is somehow disconnected from the users of the standard."

Dispelling Misconceptions

Before coming to the NFPA, Willett worked in the fire service in the defense department at Westover AFB in Massachusetts. He went from there to the Wilbraham (MA) Fire Department, where he stayed for 26 years, eventually becoming chief. Then he spent six years in the Concord (MA) Fire Department before retiring in 2009.

Willett says he very much wants to dispel misconceptions about NFPA standards. "Having sat in on many technical committees and having had conversations with many committee members, all of whom are volunteers, the overarching observation I would make is that the NFPA standards development process is unique in, among other things, the fact that it is accredited by the American Standards Institute."

But that's not all. Although the NFPA is perhaps the best known practitioner, it is not alone in relying on a consensus process, which contrasts with, for example, a government agency deciding on its own about what standards to impose. By contrast, the consensus process engages a wide range of relevant views and works to hammer out the best and most pragmatic standards.

Open Process

Willett says the NFPA goes to great lengths to ensure openness, transparency, and balance in its work.

The openness is underscored, he notes, by the fact that participants do not have to be dues-paying NFPA members to be part of a technical committee. The NFPA also has a total of nine different member categories, helping to provide a wide breadth of input. Those categories include the following: Manufacturer, User, Installer/Maintainer, Labor, Applied Research/Testing Laboratory, Enforcing Authority, Insurance, Consumer, and Special Expert.

"It is an obvious benefit to everyone that the person sitting on the committee has knowledge of the standard and has applied it," says Willett. "We do have some people who may not have a lot of direct experience with a given standard, but they usually have an important or useful perspective," he explains.

Sometimes, admits Willett, users of standards will ask why a manufacturer is on a committee. He says that although manufacturer members represent their companies, their presence on the committee is very valuable because of the expertise they represent. For example, when the committee is focused on standards for fire apparatus or emergency equipment, a new idea may be great, but if it will cost too much to implement, it may not be practical. The representatives from the manufacturing organizations provide a "reality check" regarding what is possible technically and what is feasible at a g