A GOOCHLAND COUNTY, VIRGINIA, FIRE ENGINE rolled while responding to a house fire yesterday.  The only occupant of the engine was the driver who was trapped in the wreckage and injured.

WWBT Ch. 12 photo

Around 10:30 am the dispatch center received a call for a single-vehicle accident involving a fire engine.  The responding companies had to extricate the driver before he was airlifted to the MCV hospital in Richmond.

VaFireNews has the full story HERE.

The pumper was a fairly new vehicle and equipped with the RollTek Side Roll Protection (SRP) system.  It is definitely the first Pierce fire engine to have an SRP deploy and, as far as anybody knows, it’s the first time any RollTek system has deployed on a fire truck.  There are 5 apparatus manufacturers that offer the system as an option on their trucks.

Pierce has an engineering team in Virginia today going over the truck to see how it all went.

LightRock wrote an article about the RollTek system back in July and you can read it HERE.  At the end of the article is a link to an animated video that shows how the system deploys.

Note:  On two separate occasions yesterday, fire engines responding with a driver only had severe crashes.  Scroll down the page to see the article from Georgetown, South Carolina…..ed.

Trackback This Post | Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed