Lakeshore Fire has brought a brand new engine into service.
The Municipality of Lakeshore has added a new Engine 1, a 2023 Rosenbauer Commander, to its fleet of emergency response vehicles, replacing the 23-year-old Salsbury engine.
This modern fire truck marks a significant upgrade in Lakeshore's firefighting capabilities to ensure everyone in the community is safe.
On Tuesday, August 22, Station 1 firefighters came together for a "push-in" ceremony which dates back to the 1700's when they were horse-drawn carts with manual pumps and firefighters would push these carts back into the station by hand.
This ceremony saw firefighters manually push-in the new Engine into the fire station, which is a longstanding tradition for fire departments.
Engine 1, purchased earlier this year for $840,000, boasts a substantial increase in water storage, carrying over 3,700 litres of water.
The new Engine's pump will deliver more than 4,700 litres of water per minute,
Don Williamson, Lakeshore Fire Chief, says it's always nice to get new equipment.
"It's just nice to move us up a step. And not that the old truck wasn't reliable, but the older a piece of equipment gets, then the more things start going wrong with it. And as you know there's not too many people driving 23-year-old vehicles on the road, and the fire service really shouldn't be any different."
He says the station has gone to great lengths to standardize the fleet.
"So that each lead fire truck that comes out of our five stations has very similar equipment on it, so that when two stations respond to a call together they know where to go find the equipment in the other stations truck. Because of the 23-year-old truck that we had, it didn't have the same compartment space, and we weren't able to standardize, where the new truck allows us to do that."
Williamson says the push-in tradition came from when horses returned the carts to the stations.
"So the firefighters had to unhook the cart and push it back into the stable or the fire station themselves. So, that's kind of been a tradition of history that's been carried on with new, modern fire apparatus that they get pushed into the station as kind of a kick off to their first entry into the station."
The Municipality of Lakeshore has 18 fire vehicles altogether across the five stations, which includes support vehicles such as pick-up trucks and command vehicles.
Williamson adds that a report will be going to Lakeshore Council in the upcoming months looking for permission to scope out three additional trucks which will replace trucks coming up to their end of their lifecycle.
-with files from AM800's Rob Hindi