DEALING AND TRAINING
I am writing in reply to the Editor’s Opinion in the March issue of Fire Apparatus & Emergency Equipment. One of the questions asked was whether there are dealers that provide training and service for the products they sell. There is such a dealership providing these services. Greenwood Emergency Vehicles, of North Attleboro, Massachusetts, is a dealer of E-ONE fire apparatus and Horton Ambulances. The dealership services all of the New England area. To provide the best service available to our customers, Greenwood established three service facilities in New England in Massachusetts, Maine, and Connecticut. These service facilities provide all types of services including maintenance, repairs, refurbishing, and customizing the apparatus.
What you might find different from other dealerships is Greenwood’s Training Division. Greenwood Emergency Vehicles Training Division has been operating as an important part of Greenwood Emergency Vehicles for more than 20 years. The training division is dedicated to providing the training necessary so firefighters and EMS personnel can safely and efficiently operate their apparatus and EMS vehicles.
What I believe to be unique with Greenwood’s Training Division is that we offer not only delivery training to our customers but also advanced training classes to further increase the knowledge and skills of the firefighters using the apparatus. This is a benefit to departments that have new personnel who missed the delivery training and serves as refresher training for veteran firefighters.
Our classes cover a wide range of topics. Greenwood’s pumper classes include safe operation of fire pumps, maximizing water flow, fire pump operations, hydraulics, fire pump theory, internal pump components, pressure governors, relief valves, and standpipe/sprinkler systems. Practical applications include operating the attack pumper while supplying multiple lines, relay pumping, and drafting.
Our aerial classes include firefighter safety, positioning, stabilization, operation of aerial controls, and aerial apparatus strategies and tactics. Firefighters perform multiple setups on level and unleveled surfaces so they can use the aerial device in any situation. We use target hazards in departments’ communities for training, and we address issues in stabilization, positioning, and operations for rescue, ventilation, and master stream deployment. Advanced foam operations include foam principals, characteristics of foam, foam types, low-energy systems, high-energy systems, and foam application methods. We even offer training for departments’ apparatus maintenance technicians, who maintain and repair fire department apparatus and EMS vehicles.
Our instructors are either active or retired firefighters, have multiple National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) certifications, have college degrees, and are Emergency Vehicle Technician certified. They are all dedicated individuals who take pride in the service they provided to our end users-the jakes on the trucks.
As you can see, our commitment to training, safety, and operating apparatus is a priority at Greenwood Emergency Vehicles. Our instructors not only know the products, they use them.
Joe Cordeiro
Director, Training Division
Greenwood Emergency Vehicles
REGENERATION BEST PRACTICES
Regarding “Aftertreatment Regeneration and the Fire Service” in the July 2012 issue of Fire Apparatus & Emergency Equipment, when we allowed our units to routinely use the inhibit switch to cancel the parked regeneration process to go on calls, things got worse. We had a unit go into “engine shutdown” while on a call.
We do place the units out of service during regeneration, so the process will complete the first time. As a best practice, we established a computer-aided dispatch (CAD) code for regeneration activity so battalion chiefs know why the units are out of service and so we can easily track the patterns.
We also found it to be a best practice to have our mechanics hook up the units to their computers and force parked regeneration on a 30-day cycle, in lieu of random parked regenerations. Our average length of time between random parked regenerations was 4½ days. With the forced parked regenerations, we typically make it to 30 days between regenerations. We also schedule the forced parked regenerations on our timetable, instead of having multiple units down at the same time with the random pattern.
Fire Apparatus & Emergency Equipment may wish to run another article and explain the use of diesel exhaust fluid (DEF) with the 2010 EPA requirements.
Thomas R. Wood, CFO, MIFireE
Chief, Boca Raton (FL) Fire Rescue Services
