By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Members of the all-volunteer Princeton Fire Department have had to show up at fire scenes in their private vehicles and rely upon a truck fleet that includes one fire engine that is used only as a last resort.
Some relief is on the way as the town will spend $1.4 million to buy a new ladder truck and an engine truck to replace two older vehicles, both of which date to the 1980s. Princeton University is contributing $500,000 toward the purchase.
Fire Chief Dan Tomalin went before the Princeton Council on Monday to tell officials why the replacement trucks are necessary. In an interview afterward, he said the older of the two vehicles is from 1982, has no seatbelts and is an open cab – meaning there are no doors in the rear of the truck where firefighters sit on the jumpseats and the back of the truck is not totally enclosed.
“I don’t want to put anybody on it,” he said.
The other engine is from 1989 and kept at 306 Alexander St. at the university, where school employees are volunteer members of the department. Effectively, the department is left with four front-line pieces at its firehouse to respond to a fire.
“Obviously, having all of your apparatus available to go on a call is safer than not having it,” he said. “However, our town is not unsafe. We have a mutual aid agreement with all of our surrounding towns.”
In his presentation to council, he pointed to how firefighters respond to “large-scale” incidents in their personal vehicles. That only occurs in situations when all four trucks have left the firehouse to respond to the working fire.
Mr. Tomalin said that “if there’s a large enough fire that we get our four pieces out of the firehouse quick, then they go get their gear and come to the scene.”
That, however, makes it “difficult for commanders to maintain complete accountability on scene” and “causes delays and uncoordinated arrival of resources,” according to a copy of the written PowerPoint presentation he made to Council Monday night.
Mr. Tomalin said the new purchases would not completely eliminate that situation of firefighters using their own cars “but will reduce it by a great deal.”
The fire department is made up of three fire companies of around 42 members. In past years, the department went on a 20-year-replacement schedule for its vehicles
“And then for some reason, the schedules got lost,” Mr. Tomalin said.
Robert Gregory, municipal emergency management director, said Monday that he thought that in recent years, other department-related concerns took precedence before fire officials could turn their attention to the truck fleet.
“A lot of focus was put over the last couple of years on recruiting and retention, training the firefighters and actually having everybody in one firehouse responding as one unit. So once that kind of got solidified, then we started looking at apparatus,” he said.
Mr. Gregory cited the fire at the House of Cupcakes on Witherspoon Street in March 2014, when there was a delayed response for getting a ladder truck on the scene because the department’s ladder truck was being repaired and unavailable that night. That left the department getting mutual aid from Plainsboro and Lawrence to bring their ladder trucks to the scene.
“Had that fire gotten away with a delayed response with ladder trucks, it could have been a potential issue,” he said.
The replacement vehicles are due to join the department next year, perhaps as soon as spring, Mr. Gregory said.
At the moment, a consultant is studying the space needs of the department at its firehouse on Witherspoon Street, Mr. Gregory said. As part of that, the consultant will assess the department’s replacement schedule for its other vehicles, whether the schedule is moving at the right pace, should be accelerated or spread out further.
