The Hazmat team is now officially moving forward with the purchase of a new truck, which will likely be delivered next year.

“At our Region V Hazmat meeting last week, we approved the purchasing and financing on a new hazmat truck,” said Webster County Supervisor Niki Conrad. “That is exciting for our region.”

Conrad, who recently joined the Hazmat board, said at the last meeting the group talked about different financing options, to make sure all the region’s counties were on board. The Hazmat team is headquartered out of the Fort Dodge Fire Department, but responds to, and is funded by, a nine-county region.

The new truck will be a custom heavy rescue from Pierce Manufacturing, of Appleton, Wisconsin, said Hazmat Coordinator Andy Midtling. It will be provided by Reliant of Slinger, Wisconsin.

-Messenger photo by Joe Sutter
Region V Hazmat Coordinator Andy Midtling explains the plans for a new Hazmat truck, which will have a six-person cab, a changing area and an all the storage the team needs. The truck will be a Pierce provided by Reliant Fire Apparatus for about $730,000.

“It’s going to enhance our response capabilities. The old truck had stuff in it for the tactics that were valid 20 years ago, and those have progressed since then,” Midtling said. “We added features to make our responses better.”

The Hazmat region has been talking about a new truck for some time now, also considering a Toyne model.

“We got bids from them and we got bids from Pierce, and we decided to go with the Pierce truck,” Midtling said. “With Pierce, or Reliant, we started in July. It takes some time to sit down with the salesmen and go over the truck, and everything that you want.”

The truck will take about a year to build, and will cost roughly $730,000, he said. The Hazmat region was able to finance the truck through Pierce for a period of 10 years.

The old truck has had problems in recent years, including a brake failure as it rushed off to a fiery crash in Jefferson in 2018.

When the team is rushing off to address a crisis, there’s no time for mechanical breakdowns, said Fort Dodge Fire Chief Steve Hergenreter.

“It’s very frustrating when you’re trying to respond to an emergency and it breaks down, or while you’re at an emergency it breaks down,” Hergenreter said previously. “We’ve had several incidents where it had a mechanical failure, and we had to go to plan b or plan c — take the equipment off it and have a pickup truck come from the Fire Department. Not ideal.”

The old truck was designed in an era without so many electronics. It includes a large office area full of books on chemicals that is no longer necessary.

The new truck will have an air compressor, which is missing from the old one. When working around explosive gases, the team uses various air-powered tools instead of electric ones that might create a spark–and the team currently has to use up the air pack bottles from their breathing apparatus, Hergenreter has said.

The new truck will also feature an indoor changing area, Midtling said, so that the protective suits stay pliable on cold days.

Hazmat also has a charitable foundation, he said, and will be seeking donations to help pay off this expensive investment.

“We’ll be taking donations. We haven’t really actively pursued it until we had the truck spec’d out and agreed upon that we would be getting one,” he said.

“We’ll be very glad to have a reliable piece of equipment.”