Members of Lantzville Fire Department officially welcome their new mini pumper truck on Thursday, Jan. 19 by pushing it into its bay. (submitted photo)

By Alex Rawnsley

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New truck makes Lantzville Fire Rescue more agile amid increasing call-outs

Jan 24, 2023 | 5:24 AM

LANTZVILLE — A smaller, more agile and flexible vehicle is now in service for Lantzville Fire Rescue.

The department recently welcomed a brand new 2022 mini pumper truck into its fleet, replacing an old rescue truck which had reached its end of life.

Fire chief Neil Rukus told NanaimoNewsNOW it allows them to better respond to a wider array of call outs.

“The old rescue truck was 100 per cent a rescue unit, it had no water or firefighting capabilities on it. This new truck now allows us to both carry rescue equipment and do auto extrication with this unit.”

Rukus said the main reason behind making a shift in their fleet was two fold.

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First, a limited number of members are available to the volunteer department during working hours, so having a single vehicle which can attend to fires or motor vehicle incidents was key.

Secondly, accessing increasingly small areas of Lantzville was becoming a challenge for large fire trucks and the 170 calls they were paged out to last year.

“This truck is now much smaller and more maneuvrable, we’re finding a lot of areas that we can’t get into with a full sized engine so this truck now can get into those narrower driveways.”

Many of the departments current roster of 31 firefighters were on hand to officially put the new vehicle into service on Thursday, Jan. 19.

Rukus said they continued the tradition of physically pushing the new truck into its bay on their Superior Rd. Fire Hall.

“It’s something they’ve done in the past where they take the truck and push it into the bay for it’s bringing into service date. It’s a tradition across fire departments across North America and in some of the departments they actually use the old truck it’s replacing to wash down the new truck before they push it in.”

The truck was made by a company named Rosenbauer, operating out of Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

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