How do you fill your tanker?

I have seen a lot of discussions about tankers, pump or no pump, vacuum or conventional.
But no one has had a discussion (that I have seen anyway) on how you fill them. Two of the companies that I run with have 2500 gal tankers, both use (1) 5" LDH from an engine to fill 95% of the time. So the question is how do you fill your tanker?

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Permalink Reply by Mike Schlags (Captain Busy) Retd on June 19, 2009 at 6:02pm

Just for the record (Hello Ben Waller... : ), Tankers are filled at airports... Tenders are filled at hydrants, static water supplies (drafting) or by other engines shuttling water.

This is a tanker...

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Permalink Reply by Ben Waller on June 20, 2009 at 4:33am

Mike, that's only true for people who mistakenly believe that FEMA is correct when they set the tail to wagging the dog. :-)

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Permalink Reply by Trainer on June 20, 2009 at 6:44am

Wonder why the rest of us had to rename our tankers because of the west coast:)

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Permalink Reply by John Sees on June 21, 2009 at 6:53pm

Hey, Cap. The picture of the big red truck is a tanker, the picture of the flying thing is called a plane. Look up tanker in a dictionary it will state that a tanker is a truck, boat or plane used to transport a liquid, this is where the west coast or FEMA got tanker, but why not call air tanker. Look up tender in a dictionary it will state that it is the railroad car pulled behind a railroad steam engine used to carry coal and water. The truck that I drive to shuttle water to fires is not pulled by a steam engine and also meets the term in the dictorary for a tanker. My fire company was organized in 1796, I do believe that there is not a fire company on the west coast that is older than that. So why is that the west coast thinks that the rest of the nation has to use their terms, we were fighting fires first. If you want to use the term tanker for your planes so be it, but I will just call for an air drop and for shuttling water I'll call for tankers.

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Permalink Reply by Paul J. Storke, Jr. on June 21, 2009 at 6:59pm

We have two tankers the Western Star is 4000gal and the Mack 3500gal and we have a water supply engine the Autocar with a 1750gpm pump but it actually does 2000gpm and we use that with two 6'' hard sleves and one 4'' supply line to fill our tankers in about 2 min each without useing their pumps

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Permalink Reply by John Sees on July 2, 2009 at 12:29am

An Autocar, I have not seen or heard of them in a long time. Good pictures. Thanks for the reply.

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Permalink Reply by John Sees on July 6, 2009 at 3:15pm

I went thru the replys and did a tally. This is the way it looks as of 7-6-09, tankers sizes (in gallons), (7) 1800, (3) 2000, (1) 2200, (1) 2250, (1) 2400, (4) 2500, (1) 2800, (3) 3000, (1) 3500, (3) 4000, (2) 4500, (1) 5000. Number of hoses and size used, (4) single 2 1/2", (2) dual 2 1/2", (1) triple 2 1/2", (3) single 3", (5) dual 3", (4) single 4", (4) single 5". (5) of the tankers were vacuum tankers. I did not count the 6" hard sleeve that the vacuum tankers would use when fill themselves.
Thanks again everyone for your reply.