Council unanimously approved the purchase of a new fire truck to replace the fire department’s current pumper truck at its last meeting of 2020 Dec. 15.
The new truck is being built by Fort Garry Fire Trucks to Thompson Fire & Emergency Services' (TFES) specifications and will cost $770,720 plus taxes.
TFES’s current pumper truck will reach the end of its service life in 2022 and council identified replacing it as a capital project in the 2020 budget with the goal of tendering its replacement by the end of this year, since it could take up a year to be built and delivered.
TFES Chief Selby Brown said the new truck will have features to make it useful for fighting urban and wildland fires as well as extra foam capabilities to help when battling fires in industrial areas.
“There’s special adaptations that aren’t on any of the other trucks and possibly not too many others in the province would be built like this truck,” Brown said.
Coun. Jeff Fountain asked if the truck had the equipment to fight fires at the airport, since the city has an arrangement with the Thompson Regional Airport Authority to provide firefighting services.
“It’s my understanding there may be some shortcomings with this piece of equipment with respect to responding to fire emergencies there,” Fountain said.
City manager Anthony McInnis said the city approached the airport authority to ask if they wanted to pay for any special capabilities for the truck but the offer was declined.
Deputy mayor Duncan Wong said the fire department had done an excellent job maintaining the current pumper truck but despite that the city is forced to buy a new truck just as it finishes paying off the old one.
“The good news I guess is we didn’t have to overlap or else we would have a tax increase,” said Coun. Les Ellsworth. “One [payment] would just replace the other.”
