Station 23 – Conquering the Sand

Anybody who has pulled a cart full of gear across a beach has felt the challenge of a Hillsborough County Fire Rescue brush truck: Heavy stuff rolling across sandy terrain. 

Brush trucks are specialty apparatus designed to take water off roads and into Hillsborough’s unique landscape of sugar sand soil and palmetto scrub brush where wildfires can be difficult to fight. 

Adapting to an abnormal landscape

HCFR’s fleet of brush trucks was designed specifically for this challenging terrain and are the only ones in the world with their specifications. Ten of the 11 new trucks in the fleet were built on Ford F-550 chassis and the 11th is on an F-750. These are not your standard trucks used for farming. 

Dry season brushfires always have been a threat in Hillsborough County, and the County’s best practices in fighting those fires have evolved as the technology has improved and the population has exploded. 

Frankenstein trucks

When volunteer stations dotted the edges of Hillsborough’s population center, the crews held fundraisers to buy equipment they could adjust to their liking as they built a fleet to tackle brushfires. Sometimes that meant buying decommissioned military vehicles that had the clearance and the tires to get across the sand. They did not have much maneuverability and often still would get stuck. 

Even some of today’s battalion chiefs have experience working with the former volunteer stations that built their own brush trucks with ingenuity, welding material, and experience in the field.  

As HCFR grew and moved to a professional department, those Frankensteined vehicles were replaced by big, heavy trucks that carried 1,000 gallons. Those old International 4200 crew cabs were affectionately called “Brushzillas” by the firefighters. They tackled Hillsborough’s wildfires by taking the water and the crew as close as it could get so firefighters could attack by foot with extended hosing.   

Ushering in a new era

Today’s brush truck fleet was built in Hillsboro, Texas, for HCFR, with large cabs with a turret firing water from the front of the vehicle and carefully controlled with a joystick by the truck’s passenger. The new trucks also have sweeping water delivering a spray directly in front of the truck’s tires as it moves. 

Maybe most impressively, it has dual whip lines enabling firefighters to fight the fires from the large backseat of the truck to reduce injuries. One of the things that makes fighting wildfires dangerous is navigating the terrain on foot, and many firefighters have turned ankles and worse in the unseen holes in the brush. 

The tires on the new trucks, Continental MPT81s, have proven to be up for any challenge. Station 23 Capt. Chuck Hahn said he hesitated when the truck approached an acre or so of cut bamboo with thousands of 4-inch bamboo shards sticking out of the ground, but the tires were undeterred.

 Maneuverability is key

The new trucks can do more with less water, so they weigh less and are more maneuverable. That maneuverability comes in handy in other ways out in rural areas, where most of the brush trucks are stationed. Station 23 in Dover has a few residences it only can access with the new brush truck because the fire engine and the rescue truck (ambulance) are both too heavy for the sugar sand easement they have to navigate on medical calls. 

Captain Hahn says the new brush trucks handle difficult terrain so well that they are a multitask tool for the department to use where previous versions were less so. They can double as a medical transport in flooded areas in ways that other apparatus cannot. 

This maneuverability also makes the new trucks useful in tactical search and rescue situations like after storms when HCFR is called upon to locate and rescue residents from flooding.