Thread: Fire Fighting trailer

Originally Posted by Bushie

I'd say the last of our trailers went in the late 60s early 70s pretty sure they were all gone before I got involved in 1971.



To the best of my knowledge none of them involved trailer units

Lithgow was 1997 involved a fire over run of a crew on foot (Scotsmans Hill), Wingello in 1998 was another fire overrun (tanker).
Kuringai (June 2000) was a NPWS hazard reduction again crew overrun on foot

There was no 'mandated' change to diesel instead of petrol this was done progressively commencing around 1984 by the then local governments that ran the 'bush fire brigades'. Many of our vehicles were converted from petrol to diesel and all new vehicles were diesel.Vehicles are still 'unregistered' (no plates) although they have always been required to be 'roadworthy' (this was probably open to 'interpretation' ), the overweight issues were a result of RTA changes as well as internal changes.

i.e. IIRC older vehicles could be loaded to 110% of GVM, however the loading were reduced to 95% of GVM as newer vehicles came on line, meaning older ones were overloaded according to the newer specs.
The incident 'Numpty' referred to on Lady Carrington Drive was 1989, as a result of a tree across a vehicle cabin.
Martyn

Most of the trucks, if not all Fire Trucks in our area do have Diesel motors & have Diesel pumps on them. However most, if not all, of our trucks do carry a portable Firefighting pump also. And most of these Portables are pumps in our area come with a petrol motor, not Diesel.

Which does mean we carry 2 Jerry-cans of petrol and one can part petrol/part Diesel on each truck. One petrol can for the pump, one with added 2 stroke oil for the Chainsaw & the Blower, and one of petrol mixed with Diesel for our drip torch fuel.

With the full tank on the portable pump and the chainsaw, and Blower, we have probably 30-50 liters of highly volitile Petrol on each of the fire-trucks.

I would prefer it if the Portable Pump was Diesel--and small diesel pumps are available, so it is just the cost considerations that make them be petrol.

That would mean that on our trucks we carry 10-20 liters less petrol, the only petrol that would then be needed would be a small Jerry Can of two-stroke for the Chainsaw & Blower, plus the Jerry can of petrol diesel mix for the drip torch, say two 10 liter cans of fuel, under 20 liters in total of petrol.

So we have not Got rid of petrol as it is safer in fires. Small diesel pumps are available, but ours is petrol [much cheaper to buy a petrol firefighting pump for portable use.]

These portable pumps are used to set up pump relays, etc. An example of a pump relay could be that the portable pump may be carried by a couple of Fire-fighters down to a creek, where the Fire-truck cannot get anywhere near to that creek, and this portable pump then pump water up the hill through a 65mm hose to the truck's Water tank, which pumps the water out onto the Fire using the truck pump through smaller hoses.

Originally Posted by Bushie

I'd say the last of our trailers went in the late 60s early 70s pretty sure they were all gone before I got involved in 1971.

Thanks for the Land Rover/trailer photo. Our trailer is very different to that one, but stiil square/rectangular. And I have seen other different trailers--ones with an oval cross-section tank. I do know of one of these oval ones for sale but it has a lot of cancer [Rust], which is why I did not try to buy that one. I prefer the square ones.