MD of Foothills, Longview, AB

We’ve got a really unique community here. We’re within the MD of Foothills. We border a major urban center, city of Calgary. And we go all the way out to the mountains. So we’ve got everything from rural farms, acreages, different things like that. We’ve got major high profile golf courses, multi-million dollar homes offer those golf courses. You’ll see pump jacks. You’ll see a lot of agriculture and a lot of ranching. We’re in the classic ranch country.
 
One of those iconic towns is Longview. Longview, open range, some of the great westerns have been filmed out there. We’re very proud of the town. Longview is what we call Station One. That was one of the first stations within the MB. In fact, we’ve built a secondary engine that matches this one exactly. This is the most recent build. We staffed the hall five years ago, and everything was new.
 
So it was a firefighters dream. We had new apparatus, we had new toilets, we had new rooms, we’ve got a big, beautiful big screen TV upstairs, and a couple of lazy boys that get used once in a while. Captain Rick all the hard work. I walked in a little bit later, and I must admit, I was a bit of a reluctant audience. And I didn’t see the need for a custom-built engine. I thought it over complicated the matter.
 
But then I would farm it out to some of the other competitors, and they couldn’t build the truck I wanted them to build. And through that process, I started to realize that it really is an asset being able to build an engine bolt by bolt, inch by inch from the ground up. It needs to go in motor vehicle accidents, it needs to go in water rescues, it needs to fight fires. So we need a truck to be a lot of things. One of the key issues was being able to get members of the public into the truck in a motor vehicle accident.
 
It’s minus 20, minus 30, you’re waiting for other vehicles to respond. You need to be able to put these people somewhere warm. And there’s loads of rooms, you’ll see in a little bit, inside these cabs to be able to keep members of the public in there not only safe from the traffic, but also from the environment.
 
It’s difficult as a firefighter to understand these trucks from the top to bottom and from the left to the right. And ultimately, when you sit down with your manufacturers, and you sit down with your representatives, as long as you have a good relationship with them, a good open relationship with them, and they’re interested in what you need, and what you want, and what you’re trying to design, their input also becomes invaluable in that process.
 
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. We’re slowly starting to become a Rosenbauer house. That wasn’t the intention, but the service we get from them is so good, the apparatus is so good that their competitors are having a tough time, I think, keeping up. We’ve got career firefighters that serve seamlessly with volunteers and part-time firefighters. So every day is different. Every day is a privilege. And it’s always that much better when you you’ve got a truck like this to be able to show up to work.
 
What led me to this kind of configuration was a story where we had a patient that we couldn’t get out of the elements. It was cold outside. We pulled them out of the water. And I was thinking to myself at that time, if I only had room inside my truck, I could put him in there. That’s what led me to this type of design here. I can actually fit someone in here on a spine board if I need to.
 
All right, and we have the four seats across here for the firefighters. So this truck here will carry six firefighters. Internal pump panel, trying to keep that pump operator out of the elements was a key factor in building this truck, that way the pump operator would have someplace nice and warm to operate from.
 
Rosenbauer actually gave us what we needed for locker space. And like I said, I’ve talked to a lot of firefighters here and outside of this fire department about questions about what they would like to see on an engine. What would the best thing be for how they would see an engine? And a lot of them, a lot of the complaints we’re not at getting everything you need on that truck.
 
So what we’ve done with the LED lighting, and the scene lighting actually runs off the truck. And what we’ve got the generator for– and I’ll get to this at the back here when I close this locker up– this gives us the ability to take the scene lighting straight down to the action. If the action’s off the road, or we’re in a field or something like that, away from the truck, everything is portable in this space.
 
So that was the idea about not having a fixed generator and a crow’s nest, so that this truck could be able to do everything we need it to do. So if we look at here, we have another interesting feature here. A little step down, make it easier for the firefighters to climb up here. So we do have a lot of tools and equipment that we carry up top. And if you notice here, we have our hard suction, pipe poles, and stuff like that. Note that the hard suction actually takes up the space along the shoot here behind the roll up doors, which is really, really, really, really good to saving space in our lockers as well.
 
Another big selling feature of the Rosenbauer truck was the maintenance of this truck. And what is really nice about this truck is this whole compartment’s open up here. And if I take a minute, I’ll show you. I’ll just pull these off real quick. I won’t open it all the way up, but I’ll just show you what it does here. So you just pop these in like this, all right? Give that a little pull like that.
 
And again, this whole panel opens right up, and you actually get right into the guts and the pump. All your levers and valves are in there. So if you need to do any maintenance on this thing here, both sides are the same thing. And it’s a great feature of the Rosenbauer truck. And if you really want to get technical, we can raise the cab on this right here, and these back two panels will come off. It also opens it completely right up for serviceability. So it’s a mechanics dream right here.
 
Officer’s seat, we had a laptop mount put in. And again, you can see the multiplex system, same as the driver side, same functionality. This truck can be operated from three separate points at any given time when the truck’s operating, which is a really, really nice feature to have. Up front, we have a trash line. So this is the quick deployment rubber trash line.
 
This is one of those real quick and dirty, pull up on scene, get it out real quick, do your business, and then you can roll it back in there without any problems at all. And then another thing I liked about the Rosenbauer are the options that they had was the design in the grill here. The Canadian flag in the grille was a really, really nice option. Air horns in the bumper, siren, and our famous Q siren right here. Can’t have a fire truck without a Q siren. And there you have it, our new Rosenbauer apparatus right there.