Skip the first half of the video (of course) and poof, like a magician made it disappear.
A five-lane, 3-mile stretch of southbound Interstate-15 is down to two lanes in California’s Cajon Pass after a portion of roadway washed away, causing a fire engine to tumble off the side of the highway between Highway 138 and Cleghorn Road, according to San Bernardino County Fire spokesman Eric Sherwin. All firefighters on board were able to escape before the engine fell a few minutes later.
SO, they had already realized it was dangerously parked, but didn't move it. Gravity did though
this Christie front end is from my visit to the Hall of Flame Museum in Phoenix, the Front Drive Motor Company made everything that wasn't fighting a fire on this ladder truck. I look at it and am amazed that one company was making the power and steering section, and companies like Ahrens Fox were making the fire fighting part
No, they don't seem to have any one with the motivation to take a single decent photo, even with a cell phone... but they are going to get these sold to go to a good home... so, there's that.
Americana Auction Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Indianapolis, Indiana Saturday, March 11, 2017 @ 10:30 a.m.
Digging a bit I find that the reason these are coming out of deep long term storage and getting sold is that the museum wants to double in size http://www.indyracingmuseum.org/news/ now that it has a new head honcho exec director who was realized the 1970s era museum that hasn't been ungraded in decades, and has 300 cars that can't get displayed because the museum is too small.
“The lighting, the technology, it’s vintage 1976,” said Betsy Smith, who is in her second year heading the nonprofit foundation that operates the museum. “We’re a racing museum, but nothing in here moves. Except the trophy.”
She nodded toward the Borg-Warner Trophy, the 5-foot tall Indy 500 winner’s trophy, which was rotating slowly on a lazy Susan. “I’d like to get some interactive technology in here and some video so that visitors could really experience racing,” she said.
Now, about 60 cars (1/5th of all their inventory) are displayed in the museum’s 30,000 square feet. The foundation owns 300 additional cars that for lack of space gather dust in the museum’s basement. “You never want to display your entire collection all at once,” Smith said, “but (with the expansion) we could display maybe 150 and rotate them more often.”
Instead of visitors simply inspecting parked cars, she wants to do a better job of telling the stories of the cars, possibly with video tablets placed around the vehicles that show the race cars actually racing or by other high-tech methods. “Like a hologram of Donald Davidson that you could ask questions to,” Smith said. Davidson is the Speedway’s encyclopedic historian who is known for having the most minute detail at his fingertips.
Visitors come from all over the world to see the Speedway’s museum, but total attendance, 127,000 last year, is 1/3rd the Indy Museum of Art and 1/10th of The Children’s Museum (about 1.2 million a year).
Doubling the size of the Speedway museum is a tall order of about $100 million, but unlike other museums, it has no endowment fund, no corporate sponsorship and until recently no members. It has relied on the Hulman-George family, which owns the track and allows the museum to stay in its building rent-free, and on gate receipts that amount to about $1 million a year.
Until now, the museum has never in its history tried to raise any money. Seriously, how does it think it's representing 100 years of innovation in racing with 60 cars? No videos, no interaction, and nothing upgraded from the 70s? Hell, I've done a better job with this blog of telling Indy 500 history!
These items are being sold as non-collection assets unrelated to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Foundation's mission because they do not relate to racing or automobiles in any way, and were never intended to be displayed in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum.
"The spectacular items in this one-of-a-kind auction tell important stories about life in America in the days of our grandparents and great grandparents, and deserve to be displayed and used in an appropriate setting. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum was never intended to be that setting and it is time they find a home where they can be enjoyed as treasured examples of American life of 75 to 100 years ago, or more" said Betsy Smith, executive director of the nonprofit Indianapolis Motor Speedway Foundation that operates the museum.
The truck, tender, and satellite units were all housed in a specially built station that was located to give them the best response time to downtown and points outside of the city. Here we see the pumper rig and tender leaving the station. The Satellite trucks would normally get on scene first to lay out their positions and prepare to get hooked to the pump.
Notice that the water cannons are off fire dept boats
Mack was awarded the contract to build the truck in 1964.
The tractor employed to drag the pumping unit around was a cab over that used a 255hp Mack END864 engine.
The top speed of the whole rig was 42mph but since it was intended for responding to calls in the city, high mph was not as much a concern as maneuverability, and the ability to zip around at lower speeds happily.
In 1967 the Super Pumper responded to a fire at a postal annex in NYC and managed to supply water to the massive gun on the tender truck, its three satellite units, two tower ladder trucks, and a portable manifold with multiple hand lines all by itself.
The hoses on the truck were pressure tested to 1,000psi of pressure but typically operated anywhere in the 350-800psi range depending on the situation. This is way higher what modern trucks use by our understanding. The hoses were a derivative of hoses developed by the Navy in WWII for high pressure applications and while incredibly heavy when compared to modern hoses, they were cutting edge at the time.
The keystone of the whole operation was the massive central pumping unit that could draw water from eight hydrants at once, drop lines into bodies of water, supply a mind-boggling number of lines with water simultaneously, and flow over 10,000 gallons per minute at low pressures if the situation called for it. When the pressure was ramped up to to 350psi, it could move 8,800 GPM. This was enough to supply the other satellite trucks as well as feed a massive water cannon on the tender truck that could heave water over 600ft.
The grunt for the Super Pumper system came from a Napier-Deltic diesel engine. This was an engine designed by the British during WWII as a lightweight, high speed means to propel their ships and locomotives.
Making 2,400 horsepower and even more prodigious torque numbers, the engine was “light” enough to be mounted in a trailer behind a tractor and carted around.
The engine’s design is interesting in the fact that it had three crankshafts and was an opposed piston style engine meaning that the pistons travel at each other.
With turbochargers and a two stroke design, it was as mighty a compact piston powered engine the world had ever known to that point. It was thirsty, 137 gallons of diesel fuel per hour and the noise was so deafening that firemen near the truck had to wear hearing protection.
By the time of its retirement in April 1982, FDNY's super pumper had responded to more than 2,200 calls, and it even took over the task of a failed pumping station in the city's municipal water supply at one time.
There is even a book: "The Super Pumper System" by John A. Calderone - The entire history of the Super Pumper is covered: from its basic concept, awarding of the contract to Mack Trucks in 1963; construction, selection of firehouses and personnel, official acceptance and placement in service in 1965, gradual decline in the 1970’s, and eventual elimination from active service in 1982.
