Lonny Walch, Pahrangat Valley Volunteer Fire District president, left, and Steve Meldrum, fire chief, stand in front of the new 2016 Dodge RAM 5500 fire truck.
Pahranagat Valley Volunteer Fire Department has a new fire truck in the lineup. Rick Stever, chief of the Lincoln County Fire District, said the truck was purchased by Lincoln County, but Stever said he is going to station it in Alamo, “to make it easier for them to respond out of their district and within the county’s fire district.”
The truck is a 2016 Dodge Ram 5500 with a CAFS unit (Compressed Air Foam System), a 150 gallon “foam solution vessel,” four large air storage bottles, and a series of levers, values, pressure regulator, manifold, and a single attached hose line, plus a 385-gallon water tank.
Stever said the unit was built by BG Fire in Elgin, North Dakota, and he was able to purchase the truck with money remaining in the fire district budget.
Lonny Walch, president of the Pahranagat fire department said, “We call it a squad truck. It has four doors and will seat six. It’s going to be a piece of equipment we can use here to run on car accidents as well as fires. It will carry our Jaws of Life machinery and has some really nice compartments built into it.”
The truck was delivered April 8 to Alamo by Ron Bartz of BG Fire. He gave a training session to about six of the PV volunteer firefighters and has tentatively scheduled another training for July and possibly in March of 2017. “Training is an endless process,” Stever said, “It’s ongoing all the time.”
The new truck is housed at the Eric Lee Memorial Fire Station in Alamo. Stever noted “Alamo has been doing a tremendous job in supporting the county, responding outside their own district, responding to calls up and down U.S. 93, along State Route 318, and out to Rachel on State Route 375. They have been very cooperative in taking those calls, and we are very grateful for their help.”
Walch also said the new truck will definitely improve what they have had, and they might move one of the other trucks up to the Hiko Fire Station.
He added the new truck is faster than any of the others. “Top speed on what we have had is about 65 miles per hour, but this new truck is much faster, and will improve our response time by a couple of minutes. And the CAFS system is also going to allow us to assist on structure fires in town, in the valley, on rural calls, etc. It will be a great help in many ways.”
PVVFD chief Steve Meldrum said new technology is showing that compressed air foam is just as effective in firefighting as water.
