In part 4 of the fire truck tower ladder training video series, “Training To Perform Under Pressure” instructor, Steve Ripley, A.K.A. “Rip”, features the advantages and limitations of a straight stick aerial.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:
Steve Ripley. Most people call me rip. Easy to remember. I love ladder truck work. Most of my career has been spent on special pieces. Let’s go up here and we’ll talk about their straight stick. All right, so if we look here. This one has, um, some lights here on the, on the outside, they’re a little bit bigger, so what I like to do is I like to try to keep all my lights inside of here if I can just ’cause it cleans up this tip.
Not a bad thing. They’re, they’re very low. They’re not all sticking out really far. And also if we look up here, we got tip controls on this ladder truck, the tip controls Here we can make finite adjustments from the tip. The, uh, tip controls generally run at one third, the speed as our pedestal, um, controls.
So they’re very slow. These are gonna be electric over hydraulic, very similar to the, um, platforms. So when you get these, there’s a delay. When you start pushing in, you’re gonna get a small delay. So just anticipate that when you let off. You’ll have a little bit delay, so you’ll get a little bit of a drift when you do that.
Not too bad, though. Also, if you look our pinnable waterway right here, they’ve got it set up in, um, rescue mode. That’s how most, um, departments keep it. And then if you need it for firefighting, you can still flow water from back here. But generally, if I want it in firefighting, it’s gonna move up here somewhere.
And it’s gonna click in right here. So the, uh, nozzle is closer to the tip and we can get, uh, further over. Or above if we need to. If you look down here, they, they’ve got a ladder down on the outside. if they’re gonna go, um, use this because they become a parapet wall. They have to move their ladder from the base section and, and bring it up the ladder.
They do have some tools back here, mounted low and high and nice. Um, rail system. What I like about the, uh, straight sticks, if you look down their ladder, it’s a nice rail system. So if I’m trying to get somebody off a roof, things like that, I can use these rails as a slide where if you look at the towers.
Most of the time they’re, they’ve got some stuff sticking up, whether it be sign boards and stuff, moving victims. Is it easier on a straight stick or is it easier on a platform? I like that platform. Yeah. And if you train for it, but I love being on that platform and you bring a victim in, like life’s a lot easier. Right. Generally when we’re up working off the tip, we got one person. You’re standing on rungs. When you’re in that platform, what are you doing? You got a nice, pretty stable surface and you can work. So both of ’em have their place.