Westmont Buys Fire Pumper Truck
Westmont has purchased a 350-gallon, water-pumper truck to better protect the college’s shelter-in-place program in the event of another wildfire. Westmont is still completing an after-action report following November’s devastating Tea Fire, but campus emergency officials say they immediately saw a need to enhance the college’s fire-suppression ability.
“We’re not planning on being a firefighting force and will not be involved in battling structural fires,” says Troy Harris, director of risk management. “But the Tea Fire showed us that we need to have the ability to deliver water from a safe distance. Our ambitions are understandably narrow.”
College officials say they paid $28,000 for the truck they estimated to be worth about $100,000. The Dodge truck is equipped with one large hose and an infrared camera.
“One of the many things we learned from the Tea Fire was that we needed the equipment to do an even better job of protecting our shelter-in-place plan,” says Tom Beveridge, director of physical plant.
The plan worked well, protecting about 800 Westmont students, faculty, staff and neighbors inside Murchison Gym and keeping them off neighborhood roads while residents were evacuating. However, the fire burned down a eucalyptus trees-lined ravine, cutting off faculty, staff and neighbors from the gym. Flames also threatened the gym’s generator, forcing physical plant workers to battle the blaze with garden hoses and fire extinguishers.
“Our physical plant workers were heroes,” Beveridge says. “They protected the shelter-in-place by keeping the flames at bay with what little they had, but we don’t want to be in that position again.”
Beveridge describes the Tea Fire as the perfect storm, starting at the height of the fire season, less than a mile from campus and with 70-mile-per-hour winds. He says it was those unusual conditions that forced Westmont to fend for itself while Montecito fire firefighters initially focused their attention on evacuating neighboring residents and structure protection.
The fire destroyed eight structures on the Westmont campus, including five office, classroom, lab and storage buildings, and three residence hall structures. The blaze also razed 15 faculty homes and the house of a retired professor. In all, the fire displaced 18 professors, nine staff members and 62 students.
“The Montecito Fire Department did a tremendous job protecting the community during the Tea Fire,” Harris says. “We understand that their primary concern in the early hours of a fire is evacuating residents and keeping people safe.”
“Regardless of how often we use the pump truck, every piece of fire equipment is an asset to the community,” says Tom Bauer, director of public safety. “We’re still determining how to deploy the truck, but we had a lot of willing participants on campus during the Tea Fire, and we could have been more effective in containing spot fires.
“Firefighters were busy evacuating the neighborhood and saving homes and buildings throughout the area and couldn’t allocate resources to Westmont in time to save Bauder Hall, the physics building, the Quonset huts and the old math building. As county firefighters and strike teams dispatched from Los Angeles entered the firefight, they were assigned to the two-story residential cottages in Clark Hall and kept the destruction to just three structures.”
Robert McKelvey, deputy director of public safety at Pepperdine University, will offer basic training to Westmont officials. The Malibu university has its own fire department, something Westmont is not considering.
“With this equipment comes the responsibility to train and learn about safety gear,” Harris says. “People will learn their limitations. They will be in less danger of harm with the knowledge, training, gear and equipment than they were without it.”