Emergency Led Lightbars

Innovative Rigs on the Street: Fuller Road's 100-foot Tower

In last month's installment of Innovative Rigs on the Street, we featured a new Sutphen pumper built for the Fuller Road Fire Department in the Town of Colonie, NY. Over the years, the town's 12 fire departments have worked together on a number of initiatives, including a phantom box-alarm system, joint training programs and automatic-aid dispatching. Several fire companies on the south side of Colonie worked together to provide apparatus and staffing resources that would provide for the response of specifically designated units for structural fires and other incidents.

Like many departments, over a period of years each station's apparatus fleet seemed to grow in size to include multiple pieces of engine, ladder and rescue apparatus. Careful analysis of each fire company's fleet included a review of the acquisition costs, insurance, maintenance and other operational considerations. The result was that two of the stations agreed to give up their stand alone rescue units in exchange for another company reducing the size of its fleet by the removal of a ladder truck. The alarm assignments were then altered to provide for the automatic response of the closest available ladder and rescue unit to alarms, which would also ensure adequate staffing for the responding apparatus. After many years of operations, this program has proven to be beneficial to the respective departments and has sharpened the training requirements for fire company members.

The Fuller Road Fire Department, organized in October 1926, placed its first ladder company into service in 1972 with the delivery of Sutphen 85-foot aerial tower. Equipped with a heavy compliment of ground ladders, Truck 3 served the department until 1991 when it was replaced with a second Sutphen tower. The second version was equipped with many features that could not have been conceived of some 20 years earlier with a four-door, such as a climate-controlled cab, electronic interlocks and enhanced warning lights. As Truck 3 protects its first-due area, the unit also regularly responds to incidents with the Colonie Village, Midway, Shaker Road-Loudonville and West Albany fire companies.

The latest aerial device to serve the Fuller Road Fire Department was placed into service during 2009 with the delivery of a new Sutphen SPH-100 mid-mount tower. The department worked closely with Sutphen representative Phil Vander Molen to refine the design for the apparatus, which incorporates a fire pump, water tank and a compliment of ground ladders, in addition to an extensive array of hand tools and equipment.

Police LED Lightbar - Essential Emergency Light for Public Safety

The most obvious emergency light that comes to our minds when we think about emergency lighting system is the blinking cop car light. The blinking cop car light is essentially a Police LED lightbar, made out of strobe lights. These strobe lights can blink in a number of different patterns that are easily discernible from a long distance, even in the roughest of the weather conditions. Lightbars are not only seen on cop cars but a number of other vehicles which belong to the emergency response team.

Mini lightbars are very flexible and so they can be used as portable light sources. Mini lightbars may have only a pair of strobe lights fixed together, each of different color for improved communication. Police LED lightbar has the most common colors of red and blue attached with blinking patterns that can be activated with the press of a button. Mini lightbars may have their own batteries to power them up, which makes them useful as handheld light sources. Mini lightbars may come in other colors like green, white, amber and yellow. Amber and red lights can be seen on fire trucks and construction vehicles. Low profile emergency vehicles like snow removing vehicles, parking meter monitors and towing trucks can have their combination of strobe lights, but most of them make use of red colored light in their lightbars. Mini lightbars can be stored inside the vehicles, which means unmarked cop cars can use them only when they need to be noticed.

For greater visibility, Police LED lightbar needs to be larger in size, with multiple blinking patterns within safe limits. Larger lightbars are usually permanently fixed to the vehicle, and are not portable due to their size. Although use of LED bulbs makes them lighter, it is still time consuming to attach and remove them when required. Larger lightbars are always fixed on the roof of the vehicle where the visibility is at its best. Larger lightbars can also act as traffic advisors, which can direct the traffic efficiently, when there is an emergency on road, or rough weather. LED arrows which can precisely tell the traffic to move onto specific directions can prove to be very useful when the signal system breaks down, or in road work zones. Larger lightbars are directly wired to the electric circuit of the vehicles, and are charged directly when the vehicle is on. But since the LED lights take a lot less energy to burn, they can be operated even when the vehicle is stationary.

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