Our retirement home is situated in a beautiful grove of trees in the mountains. This is a beautiful setting, but one that requires understanding the interface between forests and homes and how to protect the latter from fire danger. Our neighborhood has become active in the "Firewise" program with the forest service.
This program is to make homeowners aware of the relationship between the forest and dwellings and ways to reduce fire danger. This is a very educational program and is intended to teach ways to reduce the fire danger on your home due to forest fires, burning embers and fast moving flames.
One of the items that help fire mitigation is the home owner having a source of water to be used for fire fighting. Water totes, ponds, swimming pools and other means of water storage are helpful.
I occasionally follow the online auctions for sales of government property and ran across this slide in fire fighting pumper unit. These slide in units are intended to be installed in the back of 3/4 or 1 ton pickup trucks and used as first response units for fighting brush fires. The fire department ended up buying a larger unit and sold this one at auction.
We won the auction and ended up bringing it home on our cargo trailer. Later in the season I'll move it to the mountain and install in on appropriate equipment for use.
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| 150 gallon tank, electric hose reel and hose storage |
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| 18 HP Briggs engine, pump and various valves |
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| The City was most helpful in loading the unit |
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| Mick from the fire department was very helpful in loading and explaining all the features and how to work to unit. |
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| All loaded |
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| Beautiful evening for a drive home |
That is a very practical purchase! I bet you received many curious stares as you were driving back to Wichita! Will you keep the pump filled with water on the mountain or only fill it when brush fires are nearing?
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