LYONS, S.D. (AP) -- It was 1978, and the newly formed Lyons Volunteer Fire Department was looking to add its own truck. So it turned to Harold Boer.
Boer and his wife, Helen, were running the town's gas and service station. He took the chassis from a donated army truck and put his experience refurbishing old farm equipment to work.
``I got the job of building the first fire truck for our town,'' said Boer, also the Lyons fire chief.
More than 25 years later, Boer is still building fire trucks in Lyons. But his Rosenbauer America pumpers, tankers, aerials and rescue trucks now can be found battling flames from the Midwest to the Mideast.
It has grown into a $60 million-a-year international operation, taking up about 10 acres of this prairie town 20 miles northwest of Sioux Falls.
Rosenbauer is getting ready to roll out the first of more than 150 pumpers and rescue trucks bought by the U.S. Defense Department for civilian fire departments in Iraq.
``Sometimes you look back and you can't even imagine how it happened,'' said Helen Boer.
Shortly after Harold Boer built that first vehicle, neighboring communities started asking him to work on their trucks. He enjoyed the work, so Central States Fire Apparatus was born. The intent was to build three or four trucks a year.
``The first year, we did a dozen,'' Helen Boer said. ``Last year, we built 594.''
The business grew into a regional, then statewide, then national company.
In May 1998, Central States merged with Rosenbauer International of Leonding, Austria, to extend the company's reach across the oceans.
``It really blossomed once we merged with the people from Austria,'' Harold Boer said.
The Rosenbauer America partnership encompasses two other Midwest companies: General Safety of Wyoming, Minn., which handles most of Rosenbauer's government contracts and overseas shipping, and the Fremont, Neb.-based RK Aerials, which builds fire truck aerial ladders.
Rosenbauer sent its first fire trucks to Iraq this summer after the Army called with an immediate need. The order started as a single pumper but soon grew to about a dozen.
``They said we need fire trucks and we need them right now,'' Harold Boer said.
The company was ahead of schedule on a 500-truck order for Saudi Arabia, so it was able to divert some pumpers to Iraq through Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root.
Later in 2004, Rosenbauer America won three Department of Defense contracts for more than 150 additional trucks.
The first of 96 pumpers should be leaving Lyons in mid-January, and 57 medium rescue trucks will begin shipping in February. The trucks, which cost about $200,000 each, will be built and shipped throughout 2005.
Unlike other military contracts in which each part has to be specially made, the Rosenbauer trucks meet the same standards established by the National Fire Protection Association.
``This exact same truck, we can use in the U.S.,'' Harold Boer said.
Rosenbauer's Timm Reifschneider, who works out of the company's Wyoming, Minn., office, said each truck must still be approved by a government inspector.
``Once he signs off on it, then we put it on a flatbed and drive it to a port of export,'' he said.
The trucks will spend four to five weeks on ocean liners before arriving in the Middle East.
They're treated with a protective coating to prevent salt water corrosion and everything is locked down to deter damage and theft.
The trucks likely will be shipped to Kuwait and then escorted into Iraq, where security issues could divert their final delivery destination.
``The contract right now stipulates Baghdad,'' he said. ``From what I understand, they're going to probably modify that and we'll go to a different location.''
Although Rosenbauer's trucks can be found from Afghanistan to South Africa, the Boers still consider their business a Midwest family operation. Most local and stateside customers still know the company as Central States.
The business, though, has grown bigger than the town from which it hails.
``We have 170 employees and our village has 75 residents,'' Helen Boer said. ``We employ all the people in Lyons we can.''
