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Urban Tanker/Tender Shuttles
I live in an area that has hydrants. A couple of years ago a company had a large fire with little to no water supply. They called for engines were most carry 750 to 1000 gallons. No one had a drop tank so it was fill into an engine and move on. This would have been a perfect chance to run a real tanker shuttle or at least bring in a drop tank.
But in urban/suburban area's we don't think about it or practice it. People might say we have hydrants everywhere so we don't need to practice that. 3 reasons you might - a looped hydrant system. We assistanted on a fire several years ago in an industrial complex. Large lumber yard. had 4 hydrants but the problem was they were part of a loop so after using 2 you were just wasting your time. The next closest was several thousand feet away.
A large fire on a highway. overturned tanker with spread onto the roadside.
A large incident that knocks out the water supply. This just happened with the Gasline explosion in CA. Listen to the radio transmission, several times you could get hydrants were out of service. How much hose would you drop looking for a hydrant. And then how far would the next working hydrant be.
Even if you don't have tankers or tenders you need to practice setting up an engine shuttle. Its not as easy as it sounds. Engines have different connections. Finding a place to turn around. Having the right engines involved. You might have 10 engines but what good is a 500 gallon engine in this case. How many times as a driver drafted in a city or suburban area. I've done it once in 30 years and it was on a 4 alarm fire. Heck, you had to be able to draft to be qualifed as a driver but not anymore.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Chris Weber on
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Good topic that I haven't seen yet.We don't have hydrants but we do have a tanker and have assisted a couple times in a situation like this.One one call I remember we had two different hydrant systems within 100' of each other.One was a munincipal system and one was an industrial(refinery)system.We ran a shuttle off the muni. system and had the refinery system as a backup.A drop tank is great.Definitely expands your possibilities as to what you can do.If you have to run an enginge shuttle,this would make it much easier than pumping into another engine.Would take a fair # of engines to run it without running out of water,but it would work.Like you say,there would be a couple logistics issues to consider that aren't quite as big of a deal than if you were running tankers.I am curious as to what other folks have run.Always looking for new ideas to try to do things better.
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Permalink Reply by Tony P on
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I'm in a well hydranted urban area, but we practice the Tanker-relay regularly (with us a Tanker is our 4WD firefighting vehicle, not a bulk water carrier). I have been involved a Primary School fire where the water supply around the building wasn't good enough, we had one Tanker placed next to the Pumper as it's fill point and five more tankers relaying from the nearest decent hydrant to that stationary Tanker. It work very well. A good concept for people in hydranted areas to consider - we don't always end up with the water we expect!
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Permalink Reply by Andrew Salinger on
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For most of the fires in our area we have to do tanker (engine) shuttles and but we have never used a drop tank but they are sittting in stations around the place for that day we need them, generally we run 2 or 3 tankers per vehicle fighting the fire. Generally we place a pumper or similar at the water source to fill the tankers faster. If the water is close enough we do a relay pump, where we place a large pump at the water source and pump water to another and another till we get water on the fire. Just depends how large the fire is and how long we will be there. We also consider water capacity of appliances when we call for them but generally the CAD system gets it right.
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Permalink Reply by Mark Oomkes on
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Interesting subject.
We just trained with an urban dept that we border that has a couple private drives and 1 mile of road that doesn't have hydrants yet. They had their ideas of staging while they decided if they need us and so on, but once they saw the time it takes to set up drop tanks, drafting, etc, they changed their mind on how it would be run if\when it happens.
They were also surprised that with 3 3000+ gal tankers and a half mile run that they could flow 2-1 3/4"s, a 2 1/2 and the deck gun and not run out of water. We weren't, but we do it more often.
Rather progressive of them, I would say.
Have a hard time understanding a pumper\engine shuttle. Our tanker can carry as much water as 7 engines with 500 gal tanks. Plus we have 2 drop tanks so we can dump and be on the way for another load without messing with hoses.
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Permalink Reply by Just Plain Craig Moyer on
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I was thinking of the Engine shuttle when Tankers/Tenders(for you west coasters) aren't available. We have about 5 tankers within 20-30 mins depending on time of day and location.
Funny story. We had officer training with a senerio and our logistics officer was from PA. We used a county FD list for equipment. After the exercise we realized that we had 20 tankers on scene, but the county only had 18 companies with 11 tankers. He was sending 1000 gal engines as tankers. Were's he is from anything over 500 gallons is considered a tanker.
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Permalink Reply by Colin M. on
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My department responds to more rural than urban calls, so we are well versed in the use of tenders and drop tanks. On a scene like the one above, I'd suggest calling for mutual aid from the nearest rural departments to get tenders rolling. You can always send them back if you don't need them. An officer from one of those departments could even be put in charge of the water supply. Training wise, perhaps scheduling joint training with the closest rural departments would be a good way to practice this type of water movement.
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Permalink Reply by Dave Wenck on
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Tankers are all we have in our two station's. There is a small hydrent system in the town 3 miles up the road but i;m not sure if they use it ,most of the fire calls around here are an automatic mutual aid for tankers. We have regular drills with the tankers and #2 station recieved a new pumper/tanker 1250gpm, 1000 gal. tank and a porta/ pond , their tanker is a2009 Int. with 2000gal. and a750 gpm pump, hard suction to draft , cross lays and a porta/pond. Even the other FD's in the county all have at least one tanker with other engine's with at least 1000gal of water. The last really big ya'all come fire we had was a large pile of pier timber's a fellow had bought and they caught fire, even after a 4" supply line was set up to supply 2 engine's we still had to truck water for the rest our tanker made 21 trips to the tank fill site, i didn't count how many the others made. 9 or 10 different department came and if i remember right 4 from another county. Practice, Practice, Practice
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That could make sense. But only realy if the urban area had a suspect water supply. If the water supply is normally good, then to always responding water tankers from outside could be seen as unnecessary?
The instance I wrote about, where we ran a shuttle using Tankers (firefighting vehicles, not bulk carriers), wasn't because of a water supply problem in that outer suburban suburb, but because of an overuse of the schools own ring-main. The shuttle was the quickest method to use, the Tankers not having a large enough pump to do a pump relay. As Andrew (another Victorian) said above, we will normally of course put the largest pumper on the water source (be it hydrant or other) - but when that larger pumper is already in use as the attack pump, then no.
Drop tanks? They don't exist in my general area - too urban. Bulk water carriers don't exist in the fire service, we rely on private contractors when that sort of water supply is needed, we know that we can have them called into use. The whole thing comes down to being aware of what you have, what you have within call range, then knowing the best way of using those resources. Being open to doing things in different ways.
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My dept runs both rural and urban area with hydrants in our urban areas, but the hydrant system is out dated and in some spots only gives you about 500 gallons a minute we ran a fire in downtown where we ran the system dry and were relay pumpming from the river. we found out that we were getting better water flow with out the hydrant system than with it. We shuttle water on a regular basis and also relay it on a regular basis, in these older sections of these cities we fail to remember we need to update hydrants as well. I would rather shuttle the water and use the Hydrant system as our back up just do to the fact that its not reliable enough.
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Permalink Reply by John Dobson on
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Are small town has hydrant system but is poor at the best 350gpm max. Streets are to narrow for a pond (drop tank) most of the time. So we nurse from are tankers alot. We have also set up in a intersection with a drop tank use a pumper to draft and relay to the fire scene with LDH. Are whole end of the state is good with water shuttle, So help is a radio call away.
Here is a short video of a large water shuttle my dept ran awhile back using the above draft and relay.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ4O2hB21AU
Now on small fires we have nursed from a engine but are engines have 1000 and 2000 gallon tanks. So what I am getting at if your using engines to shuttle water set up a route on a loop around a block where all trucks are running the same way. Run a 3 inch line to the intersection hook up,pump,then move on to the fill site. If you come to a point where you are hooked up and there not needing water and you are down to half a tank. Unhook and let the next full truck in line move up then go refill. If you only have 500 gallon tanks I don't think anything bigger than 3 inch is going to be needed,unless you can use a gated wye to run two lines or more to LDH in a parking lot or large intersection. 3 inch is faster to remove from the truck than LDH.
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Permalink Reply by M.J. 6821 on
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Yes there are some streets that are narrow but you can set up drop tanks many different ways if you have 2 lengths of the clear hard suction you might be able to set up the drop tank so its right behind the pumper so your whole set up is as wide as the truck only.
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Permalink Reply by Bill Anderson on
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We have to rely on tankers. Our rural system is used only if we just absolutely have to. In our part of the county we have four tankers available in sizes from 1500 gallons to 3500 gallons. Usually on structure fires we will automaticly request mutual aid for tankers. Sometimes we will use the drop tanks and shuttle water to them, and we also will dedicate a tanker to an engine and use the others to shuttle water or use the second engine as a relay from a tanker, giving us 1100 gallons reserve if the next in tanker gets delayed. Both of our engines are 1100 gallons and one is set up as a backup tanker giving us five tankers if we have the man power.
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