So... I'm just curious as to some of the general and more specific names given to apparatus from the US and around the world... for example, our pumper is called an engine (yeah, i know alot of people call it that), airel apparatus around our area are refered to as towers, ladders, airel's, trucks... an ambulance is known as a bus or a rig.
More specifically... we have a huge tanker that we call the whale and our older pumper is known as the "popemobile" due to the very high roof on the crew area.
Three of the four units we run are known by numbers. The fourth is a HUGE pumper we bought used a year ago. This unit is much taller, longer, heavier, and has much greater pump capacity than our other trucks. The difference is magnified by its being our first front-passengers-in-front-of -the-wheels unit. In a matter of days, well before the unit went into service, it became "Big Bertha" and a "She."
A neighboring volunteer company has a tanker that started life as an Army deuce-and-a-half. When that company was refitting the truck they found someone had signed his/her name in an unobtrusive spot in the cab. The new tanker went into service in honor of that long ago soldier as "Sergeant Smith," and used the radio designator "Sarge."
We have a 5/4 ton Kaiser military brush truck that is rarely used, only at hard to access brush fires. It gets neglected except by me. I baby it with maintenance and refer to it as "Sugar Lamb". Sugar Lamb is slow but gets there and fights. TCSS
Well in my old department we had a 75ft plat it was yellow so we called it the big banana and the town next to use had three trucks named the blue gooses
Permalink Reply by kyle on February 10, 2009 at 4:22pm
we got a couple our utility truck is "the wennie"cuz its long as hell for a truck and our auxilary brush has a few like "the aborition" and "frankenstin" becuase it has a GM engine and a ford body
One of our engines is called "Pete" because it is a Peterbuilt cab and chasis. Our truck company has had names such as "Babe" from Paul Bunyun because it is slow but has enormus pulling power. It was usually referred to as the " Chrome Parade Wagon" because part of the deal when they designed it in 1979, was the manufacturer said they would put chrome rims on it free of charge if they got to use it for an apparatus show before delivery, then after I joined in '92 the truck basically went out for parades and major structures(yea right, Bedrock doesn't burn) only.