Testing the hoses

Rescuing people from burning cars or homes is very important work. Putting out fires while rescuing those people is very important work; but; testing the equipment you use to do that work is important to!

So, just a day after having severe storms rolling through their city which caused several trees downs on structures and wires, one of which caused a structure fire in which one of their own was injured, Haverhill Fire Department spent a day testing every hose on every rig in the fleet.

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Crews set up in an empty parking lot and began the daunting task of unloading each and every hose off each truck one-by-one, laying them out across the parking lot, hooking them up to a special trailer which the rig then connected to also and would pressurize them to see if any of them had splits or tears. They checked couplings for leaks due to broken threads.

Unfortunately, like many other issues the department has to deal with like having no emergency power to open and close bay doors at stations or the under staffing to deal with high rise fire, some of the hoses failed the testing and would have to come out of service; however; it is a good thing that the failure happened during testing and not at a fire scene.

This is just one of several tests the department goes through each year to make sure the equipment they have is ready to do the job.