Tanker Operations

A week or two ago, a neighboring company had a house fire in their district, and we got called out to operate a fill site. Here's what that means.

Living in town, you have fire hydrants at regular intervals. In cities, they're probably every 100 yards or so. In the suburbs, they may be a few hundred yards apart, but still close enough that a fire engine can connect to them and get to your house. But out in the country, where houses are spread pretty far apart, it's not practical to put in hydrants (if it's even possible, as some farmhouses aren't even on a water main; they get well water).

But fires still happen out there, and we still need to put them out. So we have tanker shuttles. Tankers, as you'd expect, carry large tanks (from maybe 3000 gallons up to 7-8000 or larger in some cases), and haul water from where water is, to where it's needed.

So that night, we took our engine to a pond that had a "dry hydrant" (a hydrant connection that could be used to suction water out of the pond), where we used the engine's pump to load the water onto tankers who would then go to the house fire. In our case, we were pumping out of one 5" (which was then split into 2 3" hoses) and 2 more 3" hoses, which we would then connect to 1 or 2 tankers (2 3" lines per tanker). Doing this, we filled 12 tankers over the course of maybe 3 hours, which was actually a fairly light load, as we were idle for a good bit of that time.

Not the most glamorous work, but just as essential as putting water on a fire is getting the water to the fire in the first place.