Tri-Township’s first ladder truck also will be asset to other area departments

QUINCY — The Tri-Township Fire Protection District held a ceremony Tuesday to put its first ladder truck into service. 

Tom Bentley, chief of the department, says the ladder truck not only will be beneficial to Tri-Township but to surrounding fire departments as well.

“I’ve had other firefighters ask me, ‘Why in the world do you guys need an aerial truck?’” Bentley said. “When you think about all the industry in our district, think of how tall the buildings are, and then they say, ‘I guess I didn’t think about that.’ We’re up on the roofs of the places. There are air handling systems and filtration systems that catch fire, and we have to find ways to get up on top of the buildings. Quincy (Fire Department) has helped us out some there.

“This also will be an asset to the other departments in the area. If Quincy has a truck down or if they have a larger fire, there’s another aerial device there to assist them. I know the other departments in Adams County are happy about it, because now they know (our) aerial is a resource they can use as well.”

Bentley also said the ladder truck will be used with the department’s specialty rescue team, which goes grain bin rescues.

“We’re one of the lead agencies to do rescue (in grain bins), and we’ve always had to call another department like Quincy or Hannibal to come with an aerial device to get up and over the top of (the grain bin) so we could repel down inside and do a rescue there,” Bentley said. “This speeds that up for us. Sometimes it’s nice to even have multiple aerial devices for those incidents.”

The truck, a 2008 Spartan Gladiator with a 75-foot ladder, was acquired from the fire department in O’Fallon, Ill., for $275,000. Bentley said a new truck would typically cost around $1.3 million.

“If you see the truck, you would think it was a brand new truck,” Bentley said. “It only has just over 20,000 miles on it, and the ladder only has about 200 hours on it. O’Fallon really didn’t use it much.

“We’ll still get several years of use out of it. We definitely saved the taxpayers some money. We got a very good price on the truck. When all the fire truck dealers and vendors found out we bought this truck, they all say, ‘You really got a hell of a truck for that price.’”

A “push-in” ceremony was held Tuesday morning. The ceremony dates back to the days of the horse-drawn fire apparatus. After crews returned from a call on horse-drawn equipment in the 1800s, the animals could not back into the station. Firefighters then detached the horses and pushed the equipment into the fire station. 

The invention and adoption of motorized fire engines eventually eliminated the need to manually move the equipment, but the legacy of the “push-in” remains when fire departments take delivery of a new vehicle.

A ceremony dedicating the truck to Edward Hagerbaumer, Tri-Township’s first chief, will be held in December. Hagerbaumer is the only Tri-Township firefighter to die in the line of duty.

The Tri-Township Fire Protection District was formed in 1939 to provide fire service to the three townships — Riverside, Ellington and Melrose — that immediately surround Quincy.