Additional Guest Speaker Training

Part II

This week Captain John Chevalier followed up with some additional resources that could be used to augment your department's training. I chose to share those ideas.

I appreciate John's participation and I encourage any of you with good ideas to share them with us.

Read last week's column in the previous link, and add this week's thoughts to that.

Your local excavation contractor- someday you may need a backhoe or front
end loader or excavator (large backhoe on tracks) or who knows what
equipment. Now is the time to talk to him and find our what he (they) have
and how quickly they can mobilize and just what their capabilities are. Who
knows for what, unusual crash, plane (or something else) well off the road
into the woods, need river access for that mill fire, trench rescue.

Local towing company -- you may need him someday at an MVA, either to help
with stabilization or whatever. Here is a non-emergency thing, but check
with your large truck towing company. Someday you may need to tow a piece of
your apparatus (lets hope it is for something like an electrical problem and
not a crash!). Our newer trucks with their large cab-forward arrangements
and extended bumpers are a real challenge for these guys.
A recent case in my Town showed some of the difficulty in towing Fire
Apparatus.
In many cases they cannot reach the front axle to lift the truck. When they
can, sometimes they are extended out so much that they cannot lift the
weight of the truck without picking up their own front ends.

Assuming they can lift it, now the problem is the back end extends so far
behind the rear axle, and so low to the ground, that the back will scrape on
the road with the slightest change in grade up front. On many trucks the
fuel tank is the first thing to hit! The time to find this out is now, not
at 2 in the morning in the rain.
Our tow company has a recovery trailer, which he strongly recommends the
next time we need to tow a truck.

Your local public works -- How fast can they get you a load of sand, at
night, on a weekend? Do they have a vacuum catch-basin cleaner? It could
prove useful as a digging tool at a trench cave in, safer than the backhoe.
But you need to see its capabilities beforehand.