The Garden City Fire Department is out two brush rig trucks after they were damaged July 7 while fire crews worked to contain a stubble wheat field fire.
A brush rig is a pickup with a portable, 200-gallon water tank and hose. The two damaged in the fire were 2015 Ford vehicles and had only been in service for about a year, said Garden City Fire Chief Allen Shelton. The rigs are used to fight grass or field fires in rural areas.
At 2 p.m. July 7, firefighters responded to a fire in a wheat field on 16 Mile Road and Road AA, caused by a combine malfunction, Shelton said.
“When the fire apparatus got close to the area where the fire was at, they stopped their trucks to engage their pumps, and when they did, the subsurface soil was extremely wet and the trucks actually sank into the field at that point,” he said.
Muddy conditions caused by recent rains were to blame.
“As long as they were moving, everything was going fine. But the minute they stopped the trucks to engage their pumps — just because we’ve had so much rain lately that the subsoil underneath the upper layer, the crusted layer, just there wasn’t enough — there wasn’t anything there, and the trucks sunk into the mud,” Shelton said.
Then the wind shifted, causing the fire to blow toward the trucks.
Fire personnel used the water they had on the trucks to keep the fire away from the vehicles and themselves as long as they could, until other personnel picked them up and took them away from the field.
“We tried to to get them (the trucks) out of the field, but were unable to. The fire overtook the apparatus and did destroy it,” Shelton said.
One truck was a total loss, and the other had extensive damage, Shelton said.
There were no serious injuries from the fire, though one firefighter suffered a minor burn to his elbow when he attempted to hook a tractor up to one of the trucks to pull it out of the mud.
“Some radiating heat caused caused a slight burn on one of his elbows. It was like a minor first-degree burn,” Shelton said, noting that the firefighter was treated and released to go back to work.
Shelton said two other trucks that were taken out of service, but are still in the department, will be used until the department determines what it will do to replace the damaged trucks.
“We’re working with insurance companies right now,” Shelton said. “Once we get that resolved, then we’ll make the decision of what we’re going to do.”
The 2015 pickups are valued at around $30,000 each, and the portable water tank and hose apparatus are valued at about $19,000.
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