December 27, 2007
Alamo Fire Truck Burns

Photo by Dave Maxwell Alamo fire truck destroyed by engine fire

By Dave Maxwell

The fire wasn’t somewhere else; it was the fire truck itself. The older four-door Chevy pickup truck the Pahranagat Valley Volunteer Fire Department had converted, to take on car crashes, was the victim of fire December 20.

Alamo Fire Chief Lonnie Walch reported that the department had been having trouble for a while with the truck’s power steering and power steering pump. Walch thought the fire under the hood was caused by fluid leaking onto the hot exhaust manifold and igniting.

The truck was one the Department had modified to use when responding to car accidents. It held the Jaws of Life that firemen often need to remove people pinned inside a vehicle. It also had a 100-gallon water tank and pump. Walch said they managed to rescue those items.

According to Walch, volunteer fireman, Todd Palmer, was letting the engine warm up in order to respond to a car wreck that had been called in. Once he was back inside the station, he began to hear “a popping noise” and when he looked outside, the engine and cab of the truck were pretty well engulfed in flames. “It just got going too good, too quick,” he said. Help arrived quickly and put the fire out before any of the important items in the rear of the truck were burned.

Equipment from the truck was moved onto several of the other engines owned by PVVFD. He said one of the other engines is now being converted into a crash truck to serve the same purpose.