New fireboat declared riverworthy
NEWBURGH – The City of Newburgh Fire Department Wednesday took possession of its new $345,000 fireboat.
The city had received a federal Port Security Grant through the Coast Guard for $250,000. Since the city didn’t have the resources to cover the rest of the cost, Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney’s office and the fire department sought the help of private investors. The Kaplan Foundation, Global Industries, New York Waterways and Orange County Government, came through to provide the additional $90,000 needed to purchase the boat so there would be no expense to local taxpayers.
Acting Fire Chief Terry Ahlers said it’s safe to say the new boat
has every capability their fire trucks do and possibly more.
“This is basically a water based engine company,” said Ahlers. “We don’t carry ladders on it, but everything that the engine company carries, this boat carries. It’s manned by an engine company, they have the same water capability, the same foam capability, the same first aid capability and the same crew size,” he said.
The boat will be manned by a crew of on-duty firefighters; training for the new craft has already begun. Ahlers said the boat will be in full service by this weekend.
“This is the most sophisticated piece of firefighting equipment on the river between Albany and New York City,” said Maloney. “Through mutual assistance, this will protect communities from Kingston to the Tappan Zee Bridge, and will allow us to be ready for everything from an oil train disaster, which concerns me greatly, or a ferry accident, where 20 people are in the river and need immediate assistance, and every other conceivable form of emergency on the river.”
The new fire boat, in terms of equipment, is far superior to that of the previous boat. The old fire boat was a modified fishing boat, being able to only hold the fire crew and two victims. In addition, the boat was not covered as the new one is, so if those two possible victims were taken out of cold water in cold weather, they would have a serious risk of succumbing to hypothermia before they reached the shore, especially because the old boat did not have the room for the on-board fire crew to “work on them” in transit, for which the new boat has the room. The new craft can hold the on-board crew plus 14-20 victims. It also has an increased pumping capacity of more than 10 times that of the previous boat (1,500+ gallons of water per minute compared to 150 gallons per minute), is equipped with foam cannons comparable to that on their land engines, thermal imaging, sonar, and radar making instrument-only navigation possible.
