eBay ladder truck purchase improves fire services at no cost to taxpayers

By Penny Rathbun in The Celina Record
It is possible to buy anything off of eBay, including firetrucks. The Celina fire department’s latest acquisition, a ladder truck, was an eBay purchase. By the time firefighters are fully trained on the new apparatus, the refurbished, repainted truck will do anything a brand new ladder truck with a $1 million price tag will do.

The used truck itself cost $27,000. Celina Fire Chief Jerry Duffield found the truck for sale on eBay for $27,000. An individual had bought the truck from the Clearlake, Florida fire department. The Florida department acquired a new truck and could no longer afford to keep the old ladder truck in reserve.

Duffield sent two firefighters to Florida to determine if the truck was worth purchasing. They drove the truck home.

“We now have structures, the new high school, strip centers and big homes, that you can’t fight fires with ground ladders. You have to have a platform bucket,” Fire Chief Jerry Duffield said. “This puts the responsibility on us to have an aerial ladder.”

Duffield said Celina’s fire department is no longer totally dependent on Frisco, McKinney or Little Elm fire departments. Those departments would send a ladder truck if Celina needed one. Now Celina has its own ladder truck, to be known as Ladder 17, at no cost to Celina tax payers.

The new ladder truck was bought, refurbished and re-equipped for about $60,000. Proceeds from the sale of two other firetrucks were used for the new ladder truck.

Its ladder extends about 85 feet. Firefighters on the platform at the end of the ladder could reach the top of a six-story building. The ladder gives firefighters the ability to fight a fire from above which means getting water much more quickly to a fire.

The truck, though road ready, is not yet in service. Duffield wants to have Celina firefighters fully trained on the ladder truck before putting it into use. The fire school at Collin College has a special program for training firefighters on the use of a ladder truck that will be used to train Celina firefighters.

Duffield said the ladder truck is a regional asset. “It allows Frisco and McKinney to keep their apparatus in their cities,” he said.

The Celina fire department ladder truck will be able to get to the scene of a fire in the Celina area much more quickly than one in McKinney or Frisco.

“My goal is for every citizen of Celina to have someone at their door within five minutes, somebody there who can start taking care of their problems,” Duffield said.

Ladder 17 goes a long way toward enabling the Celina fire department to meet that goal.