Mountain View Fire-Rescue, Mountain View, Colorado

Our mission is to improve the quality of life of those who come through our community, whether that’s the people that already live here or the people that travel through here.
I am an engineer with Mountain View. I’ve been with the department since 1997. I started out as a reserve. I was officially hired full time in 2004. You had Longmont as a central city, essentially in the outlining jurisdictions– Boulder being the next closest city, Fort Collins being the next. And then it was sparse communities– Mead, Niwot, Erie, and going out to Dacono, Platteville, Gilcrest– all little small farming communities or mining communities with ties to the sugar industry with sugar beets.
Longmont was the hub. And you had all these really small, [? tight-knit ?] communities that kind of converse to or surrounding Longmont. We went from a two-engine department in 1997, with two-man manning and all volunteers supplementing those stations. To now we’re running 26 individuals per shift, three shifts, 48-hour shifts, running six, three-man minimum engines with two ambulances running throughout the district and a PC.

And it’s the diversity of calls we see. It’s not a lot of fires here. We really run a lot of medicals. And that, to me, we run back to the community how we’re here to take care of them. The people that we serve, some of them have been deep rooted in their community for two, three generations.

We’re now considered Northern Denver. We’re the northern, metro area. It’s all build-out areas. So being a slash rural slash urban department makes a truck unique to us is comfortability, driveability, and how we order it to function. And what made Rosenbauer really stand out, even throughout the secondary process, was how customizable and how willing they are to help us get the best product for our district.

So listening to our needs, listening to our wants, and being straightforward with us, too. It wasn’t, yeah, maybe we can do that. It was, yes or no. Or, here’s how we can work around that. And it made our job easier to design a truck.

This is a rescue pumper designed by Rosenbauer. This was our first of a soon-to-be five Rosenbauer fleet trucks that we have now purchased. We really chose this truck and the commander cap because Rosenbauer showed that they were willing to listen to us during the bid process.

We chose the V-MUX system, which is also the Vista control panel, which allows us to do more from inside the cab than any truck we’ve had previously. We control our generator, our lights, everything– 90 percent of the functionality of the truck we can control from inside the cab.

With this being a rescue pumper, we needed some specialty equipment and ways to access it from both sides on the highway. Rosenbauer was able to offer us a transverse tray, which is a 1,000 pound tray. And this houses all of our heavy rescue struts and equipment, our airbags, and became very versatile for us and met our needs. And Rosenbauer did a really good job of listening to us and being able to accomplish that.

As you can see here, this truck has a 10,000 kW generator. It is hydraulic. It runs off of the motor. We keep– once again, being held to customize all the compartments and functionality with the truck, Rosenbauer really helped us to be able to go around the truck in one solid motion with all of our equipment.

Rosenbauer also made a suggestion of running a hopper which carries 40 pound of our kitty litter for auto accidents. Mountain View runs a ton of bottle racks. We’re always having to do oil spill and cleanup. And that offered us a functionality that we hadn’t had before in the past.

Another unique thing that we were able to get from Rosenbauer were the slid-out trays. This carries all of our immediate rope equipment that we would use in the rescue, including our air bottles. And being able to find every inch of compartment space for us, we’re able to house all of our extinguishers over all the fenders.

One thing we really enjoy in our district on this truck, is our tool tray. It’s a 500-pound swing-out tool tray. It enables us to really keep organized and keep the equipment where we need it, and as fast as we need it, and keeps it out of the way with being able to still have a shelf and functionality within the truck. And we’re able to keep a 500-pound tray with all of our heavy extrication equipment.

When we did the [? coffins, ?] we were really worried about a ladder and how that would look. Rosenbauer gave us this option, and it really worked out well for us and abled us to access all of our compartments up top.

We chose a rear-mounted pump. It’s a heated-compartment pump due to Colorado’s extreme weather at times, so we don’t really worry about freezing the pump up at any point in time. It’s a 500-gallon tank, 1,200 GPM rear-mounted Rosenbauer pump. It is a PTO pump. Their command module for the pump is easy to operate and gives us a lot of variables on how to control our water system.

Once again, Rosenbauer really helped us get as much functional space as possible. So all of our extinguishers, we’re able to house those in the corner of each fender and gain even more valuable space for all of our equipment. All of our saws and this stuff on another angle-out tray is easy access, really easy for us to get to, easily stored.

One of the main things we really like in our district, are the pull-out trays for our hand tools. Here are each 500-pound trays that carry a ton of our equipment. We are able to carry and organize our equipment a lot better. Rosenbauer really did a good job on helping us out with that feature. And then once again, our slide-out tray, our transverse with two shelves just gave us more capabilities and a lot more room.

One thing that, once again, we really like is the amount of equipment we can carry– our immediate water rescue stuff, our go-bags and everything are immediately accessed but yet stored away.

On the commander cab, one thing we really, really liked was the ability to check all of our fluids in our morning checks right from the front grill. I can check my oil, my power steering, and my radiator fluid without ever having to tilt the cab. And using the Detroit transmission, we are able to check our transmission levels right from inside the cab of the truck.

We needed one more line, and Rosenbauer really did a good job of helping us out by getting us a 200-foot pre-connect piped in by a 2 and 1/2 inch line to our front bumper, which gave us the ISO rating and capabilities we were required to carry.

This is our newest Rosenbauer, same commander chassis, 2203 stationed out of Mead, out of Mountain View. We received this truck in 2017. We were able to have a mid-ship pump this time, unlike the rear-mounted pump. Mountain View moved to where we wanted to replace our engine fleet. And we went to a more traditional short-pumper. Rosenbauer gave us a Hale pump. It is a heated, closed compartment pump. We’re able to operate in Colorado’s’ weather conditions, same with our previous truck.

And as you can see by the controls, they’re easily visible. We really were able to customize it ourselves with some of the engineers in our department and make this as a super functional pump for our needs.

This truck is equipped with four pre-connects– one on the bumper, three up here. And then we actually have another quick-attack line off the back. One feature that we added was the step down. This is a really nice form and function, especially in Colorado snow and mud. We’re able to get up off the ground. We can set tools on it. And we really enjoyed moving to that function from Rosenbauer.

Once again, we have the angled-down shelf that allows our firefighters to easily access the tools from a higher spot, easily reach 250-pound trays. On the rear here, we really– this truck did not come with a generator. We chose not to do a generator, based on our needs. With the cord reel, so we have a portable power unit that plugs in directly into our power cord system and gives us any power needs we need. Or we can leave the generator off scene.

And once again, we chose pull-out trays, 500-pound trays able to organize our tools. That was really big for us, again.

In the back we have a portable power unit and our extrication equipment, 1,000 feet of 5 inch. And unlike last time, we went a 750-pound water tank. With that, Rosenbauer still allowed to put the ladders on the side through a through-tank on the tank and gave us our full ladder complement that we were required to carry.

As you can see here, Rosenbauer was still able to give us as much equipment space as needed. 250-pound trays on our sides. And over each wheel well, we have all of our spare bottles. We did another tool tray. This is a 250-pound, wire tool tray. And as you can see by this, it still organizes, gets a lot of equipment on there. And the guys really like this, how easily functionionable this is.

And then on this side, once again, we have another pull-out tray– 250-pound tray. And due to how many gallons in the length of this truck, the compartments on the depth are 26 inches and our top-depths are 13’s on the officer side of the truck.

And once again, all of our fluids are easily checked right off the front. So I have my oil, power steering, and my radiator. And then we have a pre-plummed 100-foot car line. How much we grow in the future is going to be huge. And the partnership we have currently with Rosenbauer, they’re going to be able to meet our needs.