The Eastpointe Fire Department covers a five-square-mile city district on the border with Detroit, Michigan, from a single station with 21 paid full-time and three paid part-time firefighters who run 6,500 fire, rescue and emergency medical services (EMS) responses annually. The department decided to replace an aging 100-foot aerial platform quint that was costing it a lot in maintenance, and chose KME to build its new aerial platform quint.
“While we don’t have a large amount of commercial structures in our district, we do run a lot of automatic mutual aid with our truck, which serves the southern end of our county,” Joe Zangara, Eastpointe battalion chief, says. “We determined that KME was the organization that was most accommodating to our wants and most willing to customize cabinets and other equipment.”
Tim Besser, KME’s sales manager, says the rig KME built for Eastpointe is a 102-foot mid-mount AerialCat platform quint on a Predator medium four door (MFD) cab and chassis with a 10-inch raised roof and seating for four firefighters, three of them in H.O Bostrom self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) seats mounted at a 45-degree angle for more shoulder room, and a 3/16-inch aluminum body. He adds that there’s a 56-inch-tall and 48-inch-wide EMS cabinet on the back wall of the cab.
The AerialCat is powered by a 605-horsepower (hp) Cummins engine and an Allison 4000 EVS automatic transmission. It has a 2,000 gallon-per-minute (gpm) Waterous S100 pump and a UPF Poly® 300-gallon water tank.
Besser notes the 102-foot aerial platform has two doors in 45-degree positions. It has two monitors: an Elkhart Scorpion manual monitor, and an Elkhart Cobra RF remote controlled monitor, along with a Task Force Tips Valve Under Monitor (VUM). “The aerial has four H-style jacks with an 18-foot jack spread and the truck can be short jacked,” Besser observes. “It has a 1,000-pound dry tip load and 500 pounds wet, and will flow up to 2,000-gpm anywhere the aerial is positioned.”…