LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — The Little Rock Fire Department is adding two smaller trucks to its fleet that will serve as medical response units.
Department officials said those new units won’t only save the department money, they could also help firefighters respond to emergencies faster.
Firefighters said the smaller trucks will be easier to navigate in city traffic compared to the larger fire trucks, combined with faster speeds, they hope to get to medical patients faster during emergencies where every second counts.
“These two particular ARV’s are a way for us to operate more efficiently, and safely as we navigate from the fire station to the emergency scene,” Little Rock Fire Department Chief Delphone Hubbard, said.
Fire Captain John Brand said currently, the bigger fire trucks can slow them down during high traffic hours.
“Where it’s really tight, with the bigger units, with the traffic, sometimes we have a harder time or sometimes we have a hard time or maybe we don’t have a place to move over as much and we’ll be able to get through and access a little bit quicker,” Captain Hubbard said.
Firefighter Hendrik van Rossum said the new units will also allow them to reach areas that currently they have a hard time accessing.
“It will allow us to get into tighter locations, we have a lot of areas especially out in the west side of the city where it’s hilly and we have to worry whether or not the apparatus will fit,” van Rossum said. “Will it scrape or not? getting in areas and these won’t do that.”
An added plus, Chief Hubbard said the new units will also save the department money.
“Cost savings that deal with repairs and fuel economy in relations to how much it cost to repair a fire truck and fuel a fire truck with diesel in comparison to how much it would cost to fuel and repair one of these vehicles here,” Chief Hubbard said.
Other fire departments in similar-sized cities have already added smaller vehicles to their fleets. Van Rossum said they are the future of fire stations everywhere.
“That’s the direction the whole country is going so I think it was about time and you’ll probably wind up seeing more of them, not just here but across the country as well,” van Rossum said.
The new response units are part of a 6-month pilot program. In that time frame, the department is hoping to figure out how much money it will save in the long run if they add one new unit to every station.