Greenfield purchases new fire truck

Greenfield Fire Department (GFD) is pleased to announce that late this summer or in early this fall, they will take possession of a new fire truck.

The department was looking to purchase a different type of truck next year, however things fell into place for them to purchase this truck now. It has been approved by the Greenfield Rural Fire Association and the City of Greenfield, who have purchased it jointly.

The truck comes at a cost of $389,900, an expenditure split evenly between the city and rural fire. A down payment has already been submitted with the rest being paid in about four months.

The truck is a 3,000-gallon pumper/tanker, on a Freightliner chassis, manufactured by Danko Emergency Equipment in Snyder, Nebraska.

The truck is a demo unit already being built, which saved Greenfield a lot of money.

“I was going to try for a truck next year. That truck was going to be a pretty big investment. We were talking with several other companies and it wasn’t really going anywhere. We talked with Danko and they had a demo truck they wanted to show us. He brought one down but said another one was being built that wasn’t spoken for,” Greenfield Fire Chief TJ Oder said. “He gave us the specs on it and it’s something that will benefit us more now, for the long run. Through various meetings it fell into our laps, in a sense.”

A large amount of fire calls the department responds to are rural. This new truck will provide the fire department with a lot more water capacity, which will help them at all calls, but especially those that are rural. It will also be a benefit to other departments when Greenfield responds with them for mutual aid. In 2022, GFD had 111 man hours of mutual aid it provided.

“If we get enough guys, we will be able to be sustainable with water for quite awhile. Just with two trucks, we’ll have 5,000 gallons of water sitting there ready to go. You add in the other pumper, it’s another 1,000,” Oder said.

Officials expect that once this truck is finished sometime in June, it will go on a 10-week demo period. During that time, it will come to Greenfield on a visit for firefighters to see it. Also during that time, all of the “quirks and bugs” will get worked out of it.

Once the demo period is complete, lettering will be put on the truck and it will arrive in Greenfield for firefighters to outfit it with added equipment needed for it to go into service.

All said and done, Oder expects it to be sometime very late summer, or early fall, when the fire truck can be in use here.

“There are a lot of meetings and a lot of things that have to happen [to get a truck]. [Former Chief] Josh [Oder] had been trying to get a truck for a few years so we weren’t running into having a truck broke down all the time,” Oder said. “Now, the stars aligned and we figured it out to make it happen.”

The new truck will replace a 1986 Chevrolet unit that has a manual transmission. That truck is currently out of service because it is broken down. Among other features, the new truck has an automatic transmission, making it simpler to drive.