By Nicky Andrews
Colorado Hometown Weekly
BOULDER COUNTY, Colo. — Move over folks, a bigger and better Boulder County HazMat truck, measuring 30 feet long and 13 feet high, is hitting the streets next month.
The just over $1 million custom apparatus includes a command center, a 45-foot high telescope camera with a 2-mile zoom, two TVs, computers, retractable awnings, counter space and storage, a bathroom, a sink, a mini-fridge and a microwave. SVI Trucks, a custom fire truck maker in Fort Collins, made the one-of-a-kind truck.
Boulder County HazMat Team coordinator and Fire Lieutenant Stew Visser said the new apparatus replaces a 24-year-old truck that was owned by Longmont Fire before it was donated to the hazmat team.
“We’re just upgrading and getting more space and new bells and whistles,” Visser said.
“The new truck is much larger,” Visser said. “It has a command area, so for large incidents, they can bring in a number of people for a unified command.”
The Boulder County HazMat team is composed of 100 hazmat technicians from across the county who investigate and mitigate threats posed by hazardous materials, including chemicals; toxic substances; gasses; explosives; flammable materials; weapons of mass destruction; suspicious substances; and radioactive contamination, according to the hazmat team’s spokesperson Shawn Stark, who also is a Louisville EMS captain and paramedic.
The team is its own government agency. Visser said on average, the entire team is called out to help a few times a year, but the individual fire departments respond to smaller hazmat incidents multiple times a month.
There are five other hazmat “rigs,” or vehicles, as well as an ambulance that respond with the entire team, Visser wrote in an email.
Boulder County HazMat Response Authority Board President Dan Higgins, who is also the chief of the Longmont Fire Department, said these other vehicles can allow responders to travel between the scene of a hazardous material and the apparatus truck.
“You can always establish this vehicle on a main road and then we do have smaller vehicles that we can take closer if we needed to,” Higgins said. “The thing about HazMat is you don’t always want to be right on top of the scene. You may need some distance anyway for safety and to stay out of the hazardous environment with your main response vehicle.”
Higgins said the truck will provide a better area for team members to do their work and be more accommodating to different weather conditions. Higgins explained that HazMat work requires a lot of planning and research and a lot of time is spent on the scene.
“Hazmat calls are usually a fairly extended timeframe, about six to eight hours,” Visser said. “Things slow down quite a bit when you deal with hazmat.”
Visser explained that he once was on a scene for 36 hours and the new truck’s bathroom, microwave and sink amenities will support responders who have to spend lengthy amounts of time on the scene.
The command area, computers and telescope pole will allow the team to survey a scene, detect hazardous material and discuss a response plan from 2 miles away, according to Visser.
“We can look at incidents from pretty far away and have them be piped right into the TV system,” Visser said.
The apparatus was funded through 10 Boulder County designated emergency response authorities or DERAs. DERAs are agencies in incorporated and unincorporated areas of Boulder County; such as the Longmont Fire Department, the Boulder Fire Department, Mountain View Fire Rescue and the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office.
The 10 Boulder County agencies pay an annual fee based on the size of the population to be involved in and receive services from the hazmat team.
“This has been a pretty successful group effort,” Higgins said. “With that, everybody is recognizing that it’s hard to do alone. So, joining together, we made it better than we can be individually. I think it’s a good success story for the county.”
The truck is expected to start being used next month after it’s outfitted with equipment.
“We worked very closely with the Boulder County hazmat team to design a truck that will fit the needs of their team as well as the residents of Boulder County,” said Jason Kline, the regional sales manager at SVI Trucks, which built the apparatus.
Kline said the process of designing and manufacturing the truck took 2 1/2 years.
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