Orange Beach looks to buy fire trucks

ORANGE BEACH, Alabama – With revenues growing in many city accounts, officials seem ready to loosen purse strings necessarily tightened because of a slow economy and the BP oil spill.

“We finally feel like after three years of stretching the dollar we are in a budget mode now where our revenues allow us to make those capital purchases and repairs on a yearly basis without having to go anywhere else for money,” Mayor Tony Kennon said. “We’ve been so frugal for three years and revenues have gone up. We’re in a good budget situation now.”

That’s the kind of news Fire Chief Shane Phillips likes to hear. Phillips came before the council on Aug. 21 to state his case for buying two new fire trucks.

“The reality is, just like we talked about last budget, we are very poor when it comes to our fire trucks,” Phillips said. “We are hurting when it comes to fire trucks.

“What we are asking for is to buy two new fire trucks. I know that’s a lot and we talked about this last budget and we are there right now. We have a lot of problems with these vehicles.”

His presentation was met by an agreeable council.

“Do we really need to wait for budget?” Councilman Jeff Silvers asked. “We really don’t.  Revenues are great. I think we need to move forward with this and I urge the council members to support this, move forward and let’s get two trucks.”

Reliability of Orange Beach’s equipment is so suspect, Phillips said, that Gulf Shores was almost asked for a loaner truck in an emergency situation.

“That’s a bad feeling when you’ve got firemen standing in front of Station 2 with nothing to ride on,” Phillips said. “We almost had to call Foley or Gulf Shores to borrow a fire truck. This was about two weeks ago.

“To tell you how that went down, I made the call for it. They had a call they missed and had to call a rescue truck to somebody in my neighborhood. That’s where we’re at. These trucks are giving us fits.”

Kennon said the time to act is now to avoid similar situations in the future. He said the department’s response time is still three to five minutes despite troubles with the current trucks. And he wants to keep it that way.

“We’ve had several of those very close calls,” Kennon said. “I would not want it to be me or you or somebody else having a heart attack or a stroke and we couldn’t get there.”

The two trucks Phillips seeks would cost the city nearly $700,000.

“We’ve been living off our assets for three years because we’ve made no real capital purchases or capital expenditures to update where we are at,” Kennon said. “So it’s time.”

The new trucks would be hybrid fire and emergency medical vehicles.

“These trucks that we need are, what we’re looking at are basic life-support trucks, what we call rescue pumpers,” Phillips said.

A member of the audience questioned sending a $400,000 truck on a medical call.

“That’s a question I had and they had a very good answer for it,” Kennon said.

Phillips said the city doesn’t have the luxury to have separate medical and fire response teams.

“In the summer we sometimes run up to 30 calls a day,” he said. “We can’t swap vehicles midstream so those vehicles also have life support. For instance let’s say you’re having chest pains and you have an auto accident, those guys are cross trained. You’re going to have paramedics and firemen.”

Phillips cited a scenario where a car ran off the road, hit some trees and caught fire and a woman was entrapped.

“Everything to treat her was on the fire truck and the water that was necessary as well,” he said. “It’s an industry standard. For us it just makes sense.”

If the crew is leaving the scene of a fire and gets a medical call, the same truck can handle both.

“They are in a truck that can deal with any situation that comes up,” Kennon said.

City Administration Ken Grimes said that is the norm for smaller towns like Orange Beach.

“In many cities, especially larger cities, they have medical that’s separated,” Grimes said. “Ours is medical and fire. Most of our calls are going to be an elevator alarm or motor vehicle accident and then you get the medical calls. In between all that it’s the same crew.”