The West Tisbury and Oak Bluffs fire departments held a drill on Old County Road in West Tisbury on Monday night. The drill was designed to practice what Lt. Brynn Schaffner calls the West Tisbury Fire Department’s “bread and butter” — tanker shuttling.
“During a large fire, our two engines will be used at the fire scene doing fire attack,” Lt. Schaffner wrote in an email. “So we need another engine to come up to West Tisbury to fill up our tankers from a static water source. Per our mutual aid agreement, Tisbury would be one of the first towns called in to help staff our fire ground personnel. That means they go straight to the scene. We would then call in Oak Bluffs to send up an engine to fill our trucks. And then, [depending on the size of the fire], we would also ask Chilmark and Aquinnah to each send a tanker as well. The more tankers on the road, the more water we can flow at the fire.”
Monday’s drill saw Oak Bluffs Engine 524 pumping from a 10,000-gallon subterranean tank at Chainsaw Corner — West Tisbury vernacular for the intersection of Old County and State roads. The engine fed two West Tisbury tankers that brought the water to a simulated fire scene at the West Tisbury School and deposited it into soft-sided, temporary holding tanks that West Tisbury Engine 721 could draft from. The Engine 721 crew then trained hoses on an imaginary fire.
“The main thing is interoperability with other town departments. The more we practice with each other, the better we get and the more comfortable we get with each other,” Lt. Schaffner wrote.
According to Lt. Schaffner, two tankers moved 16,000 gallons of water in just over an hour Monday night.
