Towns share tanker skills in drill at Hollenbeck River

FALLS VILLAGE — On Sunday, Aug. 15, the Falls Village Volunteer Fire Department participated in a tanker shuttle drill involving the Norfolk, North Canaan, Cornwall, Sharon, and Lakeville volunteer fire departments. Evaluators and fire service instructors from local agencies came to observe and critique the operation.

 The men and women volunteers met at the Falls Village fire department at 7:30 a.m. to prepare. Engines from North Canaan and Cornwall set up fill stations at the Hollenbeck River at Belden Street and Point of Rocks Road, and a farm pond dry hydrant on Brewster Road.

Tankers from Cornwall, Sharon, Lakeville, Norfolk and North Canaan relayed the water to portable ponds set up on the end of Dublin Road.

Falls Village does not have a tanker, and thus relies on mutual aid departments for water supply where a natural water body is not easily accessible.

 The joint departmental operation’s goals were to enhance agency interoperability, to deploy the newly formed local Tanker Task Force, to determine how much water could be continually supplied to that location in Falls Village via tanker shuttle, and to provide training and experience in tanker shuttles.

 To accomplish this, the firemen positioned three “portable pondsâ€� at the intersection by setting up collapsible metal frames with waterproof liners. The tankers, each holding between 2,000 and 3,000 gallons of water, dumped their water into a pond and went to a fill site for another load.

The three ponds were connected by a siphon, to maintain proper water levels in the ponds.

A 6-inch suction hose extended from one pond to Falls Village Engine 9; the water was then pumped through a 5-inch large-diameter supply hose from Engine 9 to North Canaan’s Ladder 1, which extended its 75-foot ladder to shoot the gushing water into the sky at 750 to 800 gallons per minute.

The drill concluded with approximately 40 firefighters squeezed into to the Falls Village firehouse meeting room for a critique of operations, which included evaluation of goals and lessons learned.

David A. Seney is the chief of the Falls Village Volunteer Fire Department.

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