"If you find one," says Weber, "you pry open a hatch and poke the camera inside for a look first, before sending a firefighter in.OSHKOSH, WIS. Its main purpose, however, is to scan a plane's fuselage to search for hot spots, usually cargo fires. This camera is so sensitive that it can tell whether a plane is taking off or has just landed simply by monitoring the heat in its tires. The infrared images allow the driver to see through smoke. Also at the Snozzle's tip dangles a camera that transmits images to the cockpit-either in color or in infrared black-and-white. Known as the Snozzle, it is an ARFF man's principal firefighting tool and can, all by itself, cost $150,000. The spray gun on the roof is affixed to an inordinately flexible cherry picker with a 50-foot vertical reach. Which is why most ARFF trucks attend crash scenes with "nurse trucks" right behind, refilling the Striker's main tank again and again from astern. Pump all three simultaneously and you can drain the main reservoir in less than two minutes. This mixture can be blasted out of any of the truck's three spray guns-a 1200-gallon-per-minute roof turret, a 300-gpm bumper turret, and a 250-gpm piercing nozzle. Combine the two and you have a slurry good for smothering fuel fires. There's also a 420-gallon tank that holds "aqueous film-forming foam"-essentially liquid dishwashing detergent. The Striker's payload is a 3000-gallon plastic reservoir, usually filled with water. During the 70 seconds it took to extinguish one particularly colorful practice blaze-a DC-10 engine fire-the truck's aluminum skin became so hot I couldn't hold my hand against it. "You don't want the motor in front," reminds Weber, "because the action up there is gonna be warm." As it is, the Striker can idle hour after hour during a 125-degree day without overheating. The engine is rear-mounted, with a roof radiator as big as a mattress and a hydraulically driven fan that pulls cooling air from above. Which means the engine in this 40.05-ton colossus is itself a whopper: 15.8 liters of Caterpillar in-line six producing 650 horsepower at 2100 rpm and an orbit-altering 1950 pound-feet of torque at 1400 rpm-not much beyond a fast idle. The FAA requires that ARFF trucks accelerate to 50 mph in 35.0 seconds and that, from the moment the alarm sounds, the truck is capable of reaching the midpoint of the most distant runway in no more than three minutes. It's 10 feet wide-with a monster track that helps keep it upright even when it's leaning 30 degrees to port or starboard. It's designed to flatten trees and the standard chain-link fences that surround U.S. The Striker thus offers a 30-degree angle of approach and departure, and it can climb a 50-percent grade. Paul International Airport Fire/Rescue Department. "When airplanes crash, they don't usually stay on the runway," explains Capt. For starters, all six of its wheels are driven. Think of the Striker as the Porsche 959 of firetrucks. Right now, the most delectable ARFF truck on the planet is the Striker, built by the Oshkosh Truck Corporation in Wisconsin. The school specializes in ARFF training-that's Aircraft Rescue Fire Fighting. This emphasis on aircraft accidents is no accident. The college possesses plenty of stuff to set alight: a DC-10 mock-up, a half-dozen Cessnas and Beechcrafts, three Coast Guard helicopters, five buses, a Cadillac Eldorado, a railroad tank car, a Great Lakes cabin cruiser, and a nice selection of mobile homes, whose aluminum exteriors and flammable interiors comprise a reasonable facsimile of commercial aircraft. The instructors call it "practice." It's more like the raw material of adolescent male fantasies. "Well, let's fill the whole room with foam, then maybe use the main nozzle to blow out all the windows, and, oh, by the way, can you set everything on fire?"Īt the Lake Superior College Emergency Response Training Center near Duluth, Minnesota, you get to do stuff like this all day. Let's jam the piercing nozzle right into the master bedroom of that mobile home over there."
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