Middlebury Fire

Today my brother a 3 year member of the Middlebury fire department showed me around their station and I got a look at their all their trucks. The first thing I noticed is that Middlebury has 5 custom chassis trucks. What that means is the cab and chassis are not maid by a commercial truck company. Two of these are HMEs like East Andover's new Engine 2 and two are made by Pierce and one Sparton. Needless to say they have very nice equipment. Its interesting to see a volunteer department with such new and nice equipment. Their oldest truck is from 1999 being their ladder which they are already talking about replacing. In Andover our newest truck is from 2003 and besides our 1965 Forestry our next oldest truck is the rescue, or the bread wagon as we affectionally call it being from 1981 I believe. They also carry a lot of specialized gear for a volunteer town. This includes a lot of technical rescue gear that they carry in Middlebury utility 2 and they have a full heavy rescue similar to Franklins. Another unusual for a volunteer department in the Andover region is they have a ladder. New London is the close surrounding town to Andover that is volunteer and has a ladder. Finally in Andover and most places the trucks are plugged into electricity and air. This charges all the electronic items on the trucks such as radio's and flashlights, but the air connection keeps the tanks full because the brakes on an air braked truck wont release until there is 65 PSI of air pressure. Normally the truck will have to sit and idle up to 5 minutes to build up the air pressure. This is probably avoided in Middlebury because they have such new equipment it has not acquired any air leaks like trucks do after a while. The equipment of the department often reflects how wealthy the town is. This makes visiting many different towns fire departments very interesting to see what equipment they have and what they carry.