The recent purchase of a ladder truck by the Mount Vernon City Council was brought up in discussion at the Monday, Jan. 20 city council meeting.
Citizen and former Mount Vernon Fire Department member Keith Huebner said he had concerns with purchasing a ladder truck and replacing the existing pumper truck for the Mount Vernon Fire Department that passed at the Jan. 6 meeting.
“If one of the reasons for purchasing a ladder truck was the height of buildings, why wasn’t that addressed when the new building on Glenn Street was in the design phase?” Huebner said. “There’s a lot of ground out there, and that could have been a two story building in design.”
Huebner said his other issue is spending $2 million for pool renovations, and then to stack this additional $1.5 million expense on city budgets will tie up spending for a long time.
“What we’ve also seen in California is putting water is the most important thing in fighting fires,” Huebner said.
Huebner said he was upset there wasn’t a chance for the community to weigh in prior to this contract being signed.
Mehrdad Zafrikar, a current member of the Mount Vernon Fire Department, said that he thanked the council for signing the contract for the ladder truck, which would have been beneficial in other fires in the community that have happened in the past 20 years, including the Scorz Fire in uptown Mount Vernon and the bowling alley fire. Both those fires waited for an engine to arrive from Cedar Rapids, and at that point the department was looking to keep the fire from spreading to adjacent buildings.
The department went to Riverside Fire Department to learn about their own new ladder truck and get advice on what to do for Mount Vernon’s own new truck.
Zafrikar also said a recent fire the department responded to in Solon was an ideal fire to have had a ladder truck responding.
“We had to carry ladders to get to an iced over roof,” Zafrikar said. “We try to get to the top of houses to allow them to evacuate some of the dangerous gases during a fire, to help with the safety of firefighters and rescuing people indoors. That was a perfect type of fire to have had a ladder truck if we had one in our fleet. It’s one of those vehicles that once it is in our fleet, we have all types of uses for it in many different fire scenarios. We have no challenges in getting water to fires with our mutual aid responses from other departments.”
Zafrikar said this would cut down on 20 to 30 minute waits for a ladder truck in the future. He thanked the council for having the department’s back and listening to what the department outlined it needs for the future.