By STEVEN JUPITER
BRANDON—Brandon Fire Department (BFD) took delivery of its new fire truck on Tuesday, April 1. The new truck is a rescue pumper from E-ONE manufacturers. The truck was manufactured partly in Florida and partly in upstate New York. It will be BFD’s main fire-response vehicle, capable of holding 6 firefighters in its cab and pumping 2,000 gallons of water per minute. It also has three times the storage capacity of the 2015 vehicle it replaced, which was sold in October of 2022.
Moreover, Chief Kilpeck said the new truck is part of a long-term plan to consolidate BFD’s fleet to just 4 trucks. He’d like to see BFD begin replacing trucks on a more regular basis, as some of the department’s current fleet dates to the 1990s and is nearing the end of its useful life. In fact, the next vehicle the department will try to get rid of, now that it has the new truck, is a 1990s ladder truck.
The total, all-in cost of the new truck was $746,933, which was roughly $22K less than the original contract, according to Chief Kilpeck. Kilpeck and other BFD officers worked with E-ONE to customize the truck in such a way that the department’s needs were met while minimizing cost. While BFD opted for certain upgrades—a stainless steel shell instead of aluminum to withstand harsh Vermont winters, for example—it also downgraded certain features that it deemed expensive and unnecessary, ultimately coming in under budget.
The sale of the 2015 truck in 2022 for $325,000 provided much of the $385K down payment on the new vehicle. The balance of the cost was provided by capital funds that BFD already had, said Kilpeck. The purchase of the new vehicle had generated significant controversy when it was announced in 2022, as some in the community felt it was unnecessary to spend such a large sum to replace a relatively young truck. But, according to Chief Kilpeck, that 2015 truck had been a “demonstration model” which the department had purchased at a discount and which soon turned out to be inadequate to the department’s needs.
“We didn’t need to ask taxpayers for any additional funds for this,” Kilpeck.
The new truck must still undergo some final adjustments before it’s ready for use, but Chief Kilpeck predicts it will be part of the department’s regular fleet by May.
