Jun. 13—Eighty-eight years after the Chehalis Fire Department purchased it and 48 years after it was retired from service, Chehalis Fire Engine 2 is back on the road.
“It’s a big part of our history,” retired Chehalis firefighter Jerry Boes said of the engine.
Purchased new by the Chehalis Fire Department in 1937, the American LaFrance Fire Engine, aptly named Engine 2, was the second motorized engine in the Chehalis Fire Department’s history.
The engine was still in service as the Chehalis Fire Department’s third-out engine when Boes joined the department in 1976.
A year later, in 1977, the department received a 1976 American LaFrance class A engine and officially retired the 1937 American LaFrance from service.
It was surplused due to a lack of storage space and ended up as a static display at the Southwest Washington Fairgrounds, Boes recalled.
While the fairgrounds staff was supposed to maintain the engine while it was on display, it sustained significant damage and fell into disrepair, with Chehalis Firefighters Union Local 2510 IAFF formally requesting ownership of the engine in 1980.
The Lewis County Board of Commissioners at the time agreed to transfer ownership of the engine to the firefighters union, and the engine was returned to the Park Street Fire Station in Chehalis.
Engine 2 briefly returned to service in the aftermath of the Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980, Boes recalled.
“They actually took it out of the firehouse and started using it to pump, to wash off all of the ash,” Boes said. “And somehow, I don’t know how it happened, who did it, whatever, but one of the fenders got bashed in on it, and my understanding was that they didn’t really know how to operate the pump and stuff. And so, the firemen realized that we really needed to try and rescue this truck.”
When longtime Chehalis Fire Department Captain George Benton died in December 2012 at the age of 94, his estate agreed to help with the restoration of Engine 2.
Former Chehalis police officer Rick Silva and a crew of Chehalis firefighters began working to restore the engine in 2014.
Silva was in the process of reassembling the engine when he died unexpectedly on June 18, 2015, due to complications during a surgery to correct a hip injury sustained during a struggle with a shoplifter who was resisting arrest in February 2015, according to previous Chronicle reporting.
After Silva’s death, the dismantled Engine 2 was returned to the Park Street Fire Station in Chehalis, where it sat untouched for about 10 years, until Chehalis Firefighter Adam Miller briefly moved it out into the street while cleaning out the old station.
“The building is just, you know, kind of falling apart, and (the engine) had some pieces and some sheetrock kind of stuck all over it, and I was like, ‘Hey, we just need to get it out and just kind of pick it up a little bit,” Miller said.
Ray MacDonald, of Olympia Firehouse 5, a nonprofit organization of retired firefighters that work to preserve and restore historic fire equipment, happened to be driving by while Miller was cleaning up Engine 2in the roadw