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?
It sounds about what I do when I have to be the fill engine. I run 5" to an manifold then I come off of it with a 5" and (2) 3" lines. Most of the tankers have 5" inlet, but if I drop dual 3's with adapters I know that all can get filled. Thanks for the reply and send the pictures. Seat belts and PPE are SOP
for me.
I was never big on pumper tankers, my bother and I have that argument every time we get together. He is a paid FF and he also vollies in N.C., I'm in Pa. But what every works for you
use it. Thanks for the pictures they look good. Like the paper towels, we carry them to but
no one figured out that they are to clean the windows.
We have a 2000 gallon tanker that we fill up with either a 4" or 2.5" line off a hydrant. In the rural areas depending on if we have a pond or lake around we have a floating pump that we can stick in the water and use that to fill the tank its a 2.5" line. For other rural areas we just go to a near by town and fill of there hydrants.
For the most part from Hydrants, if were at the station its from the hydrant Just outside of our bay doors, However in the winter we fill inside from our 3 inch standpipe system in our bays to avoid turning the city street into an ice skating rink. We will fill from stock tanks, rivers or ponds as the needed.
We run a 1800 gal and a 2000 gal tanker. If a draft site from a pond or river is used, we fill from a pumper with 2-two and a half inch hoses, the same goes from a portable pump or hydrant. We do a lot of swimming pool fills in summer, so we try to keep village water from hydrants in trucks at all times.
We have 2 1/2 in hydrants that come off our rural water supply main, so we mainly fill directly from those, takes about 8-10 minutes to fill the 1800 gal tankers we have. we have a couple of dry hydrants, but are rarely used and the river we could draft off of in a pinch. But for a structure fire, we'd run all three of our tankers (2-1800 & 1- 3000) and then shuttle all three to the hydrant and back.