MORE ON TOWER LADDERS
TOM BRENNAN
A couple of months ago, we reviewed an old article on tower ladders (or ladder towers or tower buckets or …. Please don`t go there.) The tower ladder is still the best piece of firefighting equipment that could be on the scene aside from the motor driving the pump for water supply.
Position. Let`s talk about position briefly (this subject could fill the magazine). One of the biggest differences between a tower ladder and an aerial ladder is that the tower needs more “street space” perpendicular to its objective, for the outriggers and tormentors or stabilizers to raise the unit off the springs into operation. (We talked about that.)
Another difference with aerial ladders is initial position at attached structures such as row-frame dwellings (apartment buildings, townhouses, and garden apartments) and strip stores (taxpayers). One of the main objectives, if no immediate removal of civilians is necessary, is to create a path for rapid placement of vertical ventilation teams to get to the roof.
Tower ladders, on the other hand, have an advantage when the fire forces are driv-en out of the original fire building into the exposures and the operation becomes defensive/offensive (remember?). Their powerful stream offers some control immediately to a structure out of control for handlines.
Therein lies the answer: Tower ladders belong in front of the original fire building on attached, combustible structures, and it is not that important for aerial ladders. This statement becomes most important at one-story strip malls–taxpayers. If the origin of the fire is in a fully involved store (always located in the center of the enclosure of stores), we have mega problems if we try to put two handlines in place and still perform the flanking defensive strategy on the exposures–that is, if we want to save something within the enclosure and bearing walls.
Answer: Get water quickly to the tower, drop the bucket onto the sidewalk, move the 850 gallon-per-minute “handline” up to the door, and hold the fire occupancy in check momentarily. Perhaps, you will make a major impact on halting rapid fire spread while the (too few) troops on the fireground regroup and reorder their tactics to support the new strategy. Here, you must know how far to place your tower from the building in question.
This bulletin must change when you take delivery of a tower ladder. Most old aerial position procedures state that the unit should be 25 to 35 feet from the structure. Not so with tower ladders. The position for this unit is the perpendicular distance from the building façade that is more than the distance of the turntable to the most remote point of the bucket–usually 32 to 35 feet. You must be able to get your tower bucket to the sidewalk, below the horizontal for spectacular operations (which is the reason you bought it in the first place).
What`s in the bucket? Another random thought on tower ladders is, What is located in the bucket? During the apparatus committee meetings, salespeople will sell you tons of customizing features for the bucket in the forms of tools, fittings, connections, and what not. Most of them are nonsense, and some of them will put you out of service for more than half a year.
Good stuff. Some good stuff includes connections for power tools–hydraulic for now, but if you are progressive, you could be thinking of converting some hydraulic tools to pneumatic and have a chassis-mounted compressor included in your apparatus specification.
Bad stuff: anything you connect something to that will be brought into the building at an upper floor. The most common of these features is a hoseline connection–usually 112 inches.
“What is that for?” I asked one firefighter. “We use that to supply the floor above the fire handline and for overhauling,” was his reply.
Nonsense. You have just taken a three-quarter of a million-dollar piece of mobile, dynamic, extraordinary firefighting equipment and tied it to the building as an outside standpipe! You have also taken the safety of the firefighters still working inside the building and tossed it into the can. Remember: The value of a tower ladder lies in its man-euverability–its ability to get to many places quickly, especially as an alternate path of exit for firefighters who may become trapped by fire or collapse during the firefight.
A good rule here is: Never take any service off a bucket and into a structure at an elevated location. If you need a handline, place a 100-foot loop, a nozzle, and firefighters in the bucket, and raise them all to the objective and drop them off. Again, it`s simple. Isn`t it? More next time.
TOM BRENNAN has more than 35 years of fire service experience. His career spans more than 20 years with the Fire Department of New York as well as four years as chief of the Waterbury (CT) Fire Department. He was the editor of Fire Engineering for eight years and currently is a technical editor. He is co-editor of The Fire Chief`s Handbook, Fifth Edition (Fire Engineering Books, 1995). He is the recipient of the 1998 Fire Engineering Lifetime Achievement Award.
