By reinstating Texas Ranger Christopher Ryan Kindell in early August, Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) Director Steve McCraw seems to have once and for all sidestepped a public reckoning over his agency’s role in the botched law enforcement response to the deadly May 24, 2022, shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.

McCraw fired Kindell more than a year ago, accusing him of failing to meet department standards in responding to the active shooter who killed 19 students and two teachers in 2022. But as long as Kindell’s appeal of his termination was ongoing—the ranger has been on paid leave pending the outcome—McCraw faced the specter of a public hearing and potential scrutiny of higher-ranking DPS officials, some of whom the U.S. Department of Justice says also violated state policy on the day of the shooting.

On August 2, McCraw suddenly—and without hearing Kindell’s appeal—reversed the firing and sent the ranger back to work. In doing so, the longtime head of DPS avoided having to explain his original decision in an open meeting before the governor-appointed Public Safety Commission, which oversees the state police. Meanwhile, DPS is appealing a judge’s order requiring the state police to release records related to the shooting.

“The agonizing experience this blame shifting has been for the victims’ families in Uvalde is unacceptable,” former Rangers Chief Chance Collins, who said he believes Kindell should never have been fired in the first place, wrote in a text message to the Texas Observer. “Accountability is one of the core values of DPS and it is time the Public Safety Commission held everyone accountable that contributed to this unjustified action and unnecessary anguish.”

DPS didn’t respond to questions for this story. A department spokesperson shared with reporters a letter McCraw sent Kindell, in which the director cites a Uvalde grand jury’s decision not to indict the ranger as a factor for his reinstatement.

The Robb Elementary memorial in Uvalde in July 2022 (Gus Bova)

“This is very confusing,” former DPS Commander Patrick O’Burke told the Observer. “We’re going to take responsibility, but we’re not responsible. We’re going to punish a couple people, but we’re not going to punish them. We’re not going to release the information to let others reach that conclusion.”

Ninety-one DPS personnel, including two captains and a major, were among the nearly 400 law enforcement officials who responded to the 2022 shooting in Uvalde. McCraw and Governor Greg Abbott initially praised their response as brave and effective.

As details leaked out in the ensuing days and months, however, state officials scrambled to explain why the shooter was left in a classroom with wounded and dying children and teachers while police officers huddled in the hallway. A host of reports in the wake of the shooting have described a chaotic scene as law enforcement agents swarmed the school but waited more than an hour to confront the shooter, even as 911 dispatchers relayed urgent pleas from children inside the classrooms. Just days after the shooting, McCraw falsely accused a teacher of leaving a door propped open, permitting the shooter to enter the school, and placed blame for law enforcement failures on former Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo. But by August 2022, McCraw promised an internal review, telling CNN: “Every one of our officers will undergo scrutiny by the DA and an internal investigation—just because they didn’t violate the law, doesn’t mean they acted appropriately based on our policy.”

McCraw eventually told DPS’ inspector general to investigate seven officials, according to records the agency provided the Observer in response to requests under the Texas Public Information Act. Four of them were exonerated, and their names have not been made public. In August 2022, former Trooper Crimson Elizondo, who had been suspended pending the outcome of her investigation, resigned. Two months later, McCraw sent a termination letter to former DPS Sergeant Juan Maldonado, who retired rather than fight his firing. Also in fall 2022, DPS suspended Kindell, the only Ranger assigned to Uvalde, telling him he was under investigation for his response to the shooting.

The Rangers are a division of the state police who primarily serve as major crimes investigators in rural areas of Texas where law enforcement doesn’t have a lot of resources or training. Kindell’s suspension created problems for criminal cases unrelated to the Robb shooting that he’d investigated for 38th Judicial District Attorney Christina Mitchell, the prosecutor for Uvalde and Real counties. Mitchell pushed DPS for an explanation, and in September 2022 DPS Inspector General Phillip Ayala wrote Mitchell a letter trying to assuage her concerns. Ayala wrote that the “investigation does not include any apparent misconduct or matters related to Ranger Kindell’s integrity.” 

But one of Ayala’s own investigators seemed to contradict that a month later by filing a complaint against Kindell accusing the Ranger of incompetence, according to records obtained by the Observer. At the time, Mitchell, who didn’t respond to questions for this story, said she was concerned DPS hadn’t followed its own policies when it suspended Kindell.

McCraw fired Kindell last January based on the recommendation of the same inspector general who’d vouched for the ranger’s integrity a few months prior. The ranger’s response to the shooting “did not conform to department standards,” McCraw wrote in the termination letter. “As a Texas Ranger,  you are expected to overcome conflicting information and accurately assess the tactical situation. … You took no steps to influence the law enforcement response toward an active shooter posture.”

Under DPS policy, Kindell had 10 days to request a meeting with McCraw to challenge his termination. If McCraw decided to go through with the firing after that meeting, Kindell was entitled to a hearing before the Public Safety Commission. The hearing would be open to the public, and the details of DPS’s response to the shooting would likely be put under a microscope in front of reporters. Kindell requested the meeting, but instead of granting the meeting and hearing his appeal, McCraw essentially kept the ranger on ice for 19 months.

DPS blamed Mitchell, whose grand jury investigation dragged on until this June, for the hearing’s delay. In January, DPS said McCraw would not hear Kindell’s appeal “until the Uvalde County District Attorney has finished her investigation and the grand jury has made a decision on criminal charges.”

But McCraw had other reasons to be wary of a hearing before the Public Safety Commission. The Rangers’ top brass ultimately answers to McCraw, but records obtained by the Observer show that last year the division’s leaders objected to Kindell’s firing. In a public hearing before the commissioners who oversee him—and who just last year gave him a $45,000 annual raise—McCraw was likely to have his decision-making called into question by law enforcement officers who are revered by many state leaders like lawmen in a western novel.

Collins, the former Ranger chief, said he would have testified on Kindell’s behalf. 

“Terminating an employee and publicly humiliating them for two years should … be based upon facts of a competent investigation rather than concerns of political optics,” said Collins, who retired in September 2022. “As a proud DPS retiree, I can say the even deeper concern here is that when times are tough and consistency in leadership is the healing expectation of our citizens and employees, it is missing at DPS.”

A public airing of the events of May 24, 2022, might have also drawn attention to the actions of high-ranking DPS personnel.

The federal Justice Department review of the response to the shooting reported that no law enforcement official, including Kindell—the report only identifies him as “Ranger 1” but the description of his actions makes his identity clear—“effectively questioned the … lack of urgency” by police on the scene. The Justice Department also criticized other, unnamed DPS “senior leaders” on scene for not setting up a command post to coordinate between the multiple agencies responding to the shooting. Immediately after police, led by a specialized unit of the federal Border Patrol, finally killed the shooter, top state police officials added to the confusion, according to the report.

“[T]he TXDPS regional director, and some other officers, walked past the law enforcement officers bringing injured and deceased victims out of the classrooms and entered classrooms 111 and 112 with no identifiable purpose or action, therefore compromising the crime scene,” the DOJ report states, adding  that the DPS officials who wandered through the crime scene violated agency policy by not filing a report afterward.

“How did you single out the people you singled out for administrative punishment, because wouldn’t others be just as culpable?” asked O’Burke, the former DPS commander. “For whatever policies they say the ranger violated, wouldn’t others have done the same thing? I don’t know how you thread that needle.”

In June, the Uvalde grand jury handed up felony child endangerment charges against only two officers: Arredondo and former UISD Officer Adrian Gonzales. This gave McCraw an out. Despite the DPS chief’s statement nearly two years ago that his employees would be held to departmental standards regardless of whether their conduct constituted a criminal violation, McCraw ultimately cited the lack of criminal charges for why he reversed his decision to fire Kindell. Mitchell had “reviewed all law enforcement officers who responded to the attack on Robb Elementary School, and no action was taken on officers employed by the Texas Department of Public Safety,” McCraw wrote in his letter to Kindell. “Further, she has requested that you be reinstated to your former position as a Texas Ranger in Uvalde County.”

That’s not how internal disciplinary proceedings work, said O’Burke. Kindell “could have done absolutely nothing criminally wrong and still done something wrong administratively,” O’Burke said.

“Kindell, and this is my opinion, was made to be a scapegoat,” former Uvalde mayor Don McLaughlin, who earlier this year co-authored a report tracking McCraw’s contradictory statements and accusing him of trying to escape responsibility, told the Observer. “[But] I’m not condoning any law enforcement officer that was there, because in my honest opinion, there was a failure of leadership across the board.”

By avoiding a public hearing, which might have examined the decision-making of high-ranking DPS officials, McLaughlin said, McCraw is preventing the type of deep dive that might actually shed light on what went wrong.

“Why not lay your cards on the table?” asked McLaughlin, who’s now running for the Texas House as a Republican. “If you made mistakes—you know, in my opinion, there’s no question mistakes were made that day—own up to them. These families deserve answers. This community deserves answers, and to still withhold information to me is wrong.”

In his letter reversing the firing, McCraw also wrote that he “decided to alter my preliminary decision based on a review of the completed Texas Ranger criminal investigation,” which formed the basis for Mitchell’s criminal cases, and “an internal review of the actions of Texas Department of Public Safety Officers who responded to the attack.” That leaves the impression that McCraw overrode the DPS inspector general’s conclusion based, at least in part, on an investigation by Kindell’s fellow rangers.

Uvalde families gather at the Texas Capitol in November 2022 for a Day of the Dead-themed march to the Governor’s Mansion to demand gun control legislation. (Gus Bova)

“It doesn’t matter who investigates what,” said Jesse Rizo, whose niece Jackie Cazares was killed in the shooting and who now serves on the Uvalde school board. “To me, what they don’t want is a tarnished record, a tarnished badge. Not only that, there’s not that much anger and movement anymore. … They know that it’s dying down.”

Rizo said that he hopes the eventual release of additional records by the agencies that responded to the shooting—the City of Uvalde was recently the first to abandon the fight to keep documents secret—as well as public trials of Arredondo and Gonzales will shed more light on what happened more than two years ago.

“Hopefully you’ll be able to hear the story at the trial about why there was such a massive failure,” Rizo said. “I think justice is coming. It just takes a little bit.”

The last time I’d met with Naftali Bennett was at his home north of Tel Aviv not long after the attacks of Oct. 7 and just before Israel’s army went into the Gaza Strip. The former Israeli prime minister was worried about a blood bath. He also had a plan to avoid it.

Bennett, whose short-lived term of office from 2021 to 2022 was notable for the ideological breadth of his government, sketched a four-part concept: Seize Gaza’s peripheries without trying to occupy its cities. Provide Palestinians with food, water, medicine and safe havens but not the fuel that Hamas needs to operate its tunnels. Use an “ongoing and persistent series of targeted ground raids” to gradually degrade and destroy Hamas’ military over months or years. Offer safe passage out of Gaza for Hamas fighters willing to surrender, probably in exchange for the release of Israel’s hostages.

Benjamin Netanyahu ignored the advice. After 10 months of grinding war, Israel has achieved none of its major objectives. Hamas is not defeated. Its leader, Yahya Sinwar, is still at large and making demands. Scores of hostages remain in captivity. Tens of thousands of Israelis cannot return to their homes. The country is as divided as before and more isolated than ever. And Israelis are girding for a major, multifront war against Iran and its proxies.

So what would Bennett have Israel do now? With polls showing him drawing even with or beating Netanyahu as the person Israelis want as their prime minister, his views matter.

“I see words that send one message and actions that are the contrary,” Bennett told me last week when I saw him in New York. He was referring to Netanyahu’s conduct of the war in Gaza. But Bennett was also thinking about Israel’s approach to Iran, which is now closer than ever to a nuclear breakout, despite years of Netanyahu’s public vows that he would never allow the Islamic republic to get this close to a bomb.

Regarding Gaza, Bennett saw two defensible courses of action. The first — his clear preference — is a short, sharp, decisive surge of forces that can knock out Hamas: “If you’re in a boxing ring and you just hit your opponent and he’s just wobbling, you zero in and give him another punch,” Bennett said. The second option is to cut a hostage deal, declare a cease-fire and “fight another day.” That’s the Biden administration’s clear preference; for Israel, it hinges on questions of its ordnance stockpiles and how long it can sustain a high-intensity war.

What Netanyahu is doing is something else. He is talking out of both sides of his mouth — alternating between promises of “total victory” and an immediate deal to bring Israel’s hostages home. At the same time, he is waging a low-intensity war of attrition, reminiscent of William Westmoreland’s Vietnam strategy against an enemy that continually replenished itself, with no end in sight.

“I know there is a body count of Hamas combatants,” Bennett said. “When you count bodies, you are assuming a finite number of combatants. But you have a population of 1 million to draw on,” he added, referring to Hamas. “They could have recruited another 10,000 in the meantime. That’s not how you win a war.”

Then there is Netanyahu’s other dismal failure: Iran. For years, Bennett has warned of Tehran’s “octopus strategy,” in which the regime “builds proxies and tentacles across the Middle East and the world, for that matter, and funds, arms and directs them, yet hardly pays a price.” For more than 20 years, the arms of the octopus — in Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Iraq and Yemen — have grown strong while Netanyahu insisted that the focus had to be on Iran’s nuclear programs.

“What we got was both,” Bennett lamented. Tehran built “an empire of rockets and terror” ringing Israel. But Netanyahu also whiffed on the decision to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities when there was still a realistic chance of destroying them in their relative infancy. Now Iran has become a de facto nuclear-threshold state, able to “quickly produce weapons-grade uranium, at multiple facilities, if it chooses to do so,” as an unclassified U.S. intelligence document recently noted.

If Iran were able to deploy nuclear warheads on ballistic missiles — or share them with a proxy like Hezbollah — the Jewish state would be on a road to extinction. The only policy that can reverse it, Bennett warned, is “to topple the Iranian regime before it fully acquires a nuclear weapon.”

He isn’t imagining Iraq-style regime change, with foreign divisions marching toward the capital. Israel can’t do it, and Americans won’t.

What he has in mind, instead, is what happened to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. That, too, was an old regime, “rigid and disconnected,” he said, “profoundly corrupt and incompetent and despised by its own people.” In part, the Soviet Union fell of its own weight. But it was also kicked in its heels — by collapsing oil revenues, a slow bleed in Afghanistan, covert Western support for dissident movements like Solidarity and a clarity of vision that the goal of Western policy was the collapse of the communist empire, not the management of a delicate status quo.

The opportunity with Iran, as Bennett sees it, is that “the head of the octopus is much weaker, much more vulnerable and feeble, than its arms. So how foolish are we to engage in war with the arms when we could engage with the head?” That would mean a resumption of serious economic sanctions — thanks to administration waivers, Iran today exports nearly four times as much oil as it did four years ago — and empowering Iran’s powerful opposition movement, particularly with communications gear.

That’s an effort only an American president can lead. What about the immediate crisis with Iran?

I asked Bennett about the timing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran. After a long pause, he replied, “It’s very hard to cherry-pick particular actions if there’s no broad strategy.” But he also warned Iran that it had “huge vulnerabilities, especially in its energy sector, which is highly concentrated in a few bottlenecks that can be dealt with. They should be afraid right now and not the 10 million Israelis. This whole passive method in which our enemies take the lead is not the Israeli way.”

Bennett left the prime minister’s office vowing to stay away from politics for at least a decade. He left me with little doubt that he’s on the verge of getting back in, with the aim of toppling the ruling coalition through parliamentary maneuvers this year and going for elections. He pledged a thorough housecleaning that could help unite Israelis once again.

“All the senior leadership of Israel, political and military, needs to be replaced,” he said. To defeat one regime, another one must first be beaten.

Bret Stephens writes a column for the New York Times.

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We’re firmly in the “buyer beware” era of obesity drugs. And unfortunately, it seems like we’re going to be stuck here for a while — even after product shortages resolve.

There’s recently been a flurry of worrying warnings about the safety and efficacy of knock-off obesity medications. Despite how these drugs are often marketed, they are not generic versions of Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy or Eli Lilly & Co.’s Zepbound. And they might be dangerous, as a new study — and increased calls to Poison Control — make clear.

Consumers today are bombarded with messages about Wegovy and Zepbound (also known as semaglutide and tirzepatide, or by the names of their diabetes-drug counterparts, Ozempic and Mounjaro). Beyond the intense media coverage and TikTok weight-loss testimonials, there are online ads, billboards, signs in storefronts and “med spas.” More recently, the drug manufacturers have produced their own glossy commercials.

“I dropped off my kids at camp this morning and saw a sign on the street that said, ‘Get your semgalutide here’ by some doctor prescribing it out of a clinic,” Tim Mackey, a professor at UC San Diego’s Global Health Program, where he studies counterfeit drugs. “That’s kind of what the market looks like right now — a mix of different access points and risk factors for consumers.”

Some of what’s on offer is legit product, of course. But it’s increasingly difficult for consumers to know what’s real and what’s too good to be true.

Mackey and his collaborators recently published work that hints at the reach and dangers of those counterfeit drugs. The group analyzed nearly 1,100 websites mentioning semaglutide in July 2023, and found that 134 of those directed people to illegal online pharmacies, where people could buy products without a prescription.

The researchers ordered samples from six rogue sites with the intention of analyzing their quality. But three orders never arrived, and the vendors asked for more money to help the product clear customs — a common scam.

Of the products that did arrive, one appeared to be contaminated with bacteria and all three had a much higher amount of semaglutide than indicated on the label.

Because the researchers were only interested in businesses selling the drug without a prescription, they didn’t investigate the practices of 148 telemedicine sites they identified that required one. But it’s fair to say that buyers should beware of those, too.

The big issue here is the uncertain quality of their compounded semaglutide or tirzepatide. Compounded versions are not generics, but reside in a regulatory grey zone that allows pharmacies to sell alternate versions of brand-name products amid a drug shortage. It’s unclear where pharmacies are getting their active ingredient, and, as Bloomberg recently reported, whether they are preparing it under the kind of sterile conditions needed to keep out contaminants.

Still other sellers are offering the product in unproven formulations, like lozenges or oral drops, or mixed with ingredients that purport to improve weight loss or minimize side effects, but could affect the drug’s efficacy.

A few different things are going on at once. Soaring demand has outpaced supply. Spotty insurance coverage has pushed some customers to look for cheaper alternatives. And consumers may be confused between the genuine product provided by pharmacies, the compounded product (mostly) legally sold by some clinics, and the counterfeit stuff.

The result has not been good for consumers. The World Health Organization in June warned the public about falsified vials of semaglutide that contained undeclared ingredients, including insulin. And in July, the Food and Drug Administration warned consumers about dosing errors occurring with compounded drugs, some of which caused people to end up in the hospital. Rather than the single-use pens sold by Novo Nordisk, compounders typically offer a vial of semaglutide and inexperienced patients injected far too much of the drug. Calls to Poison Control centers related to overdoses or side effects of this class of drugs have soared from less than 1,000 in all of 2019 to nearly 700 in June 2024 alone.

The problem may abate once Novo Nordisk and Lilly have sufficient manufacturing capacity to meet demand for Wegovy and Zepbound. (The arrival of competing drugs could help, too.) In theory, the end of the drug shortage would spell the end of the compounding free-for-all — though some might find ways to get around the regulations to continue offering some version of the products. A good sign came last week when the FDA indicated that tirzepatide was now considered available, a situation that Lilly CEO David Ricks had told Bloomberg was imminent.

Unfortunately, even if the compounding issue clears up, the problem with counterfeits is likely to persist. Mackey doubts a steady supply of legitimate product — or even significantly improved insurance coverage — can fix that problem, which has evolved into a game of regulatory Whac-a-Mole with new sites popping up as fast as others are shut down. That’s not dissimilar to the years-long game regulators have been playing with counterfeit producers of other products that have captured the cultural zeitgeist, like Viagra.

What a mess.

For now, the best strategy — though a frustrating one — is simply to keep reminding consumers that fake drugs are no bargain.

Lisa Jarvis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering biotech, health care and the pharmaceutical industry. Previously, she was executive editor of Chemical & Engineering News.

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At a production facility in Minnesota, a man worked meticulously to attach a “Saint Paul Fire” decal to the city’s newest firetruck.

Another worker was customizing shelves inside the truck, ensuring there was a place to secure all the firefighters’ equipment.

The firetruck was switched on, but unlike the noisy rumble of most large vehicles, it was humming quietly. This is Minnesota’s first electric firetruck, which will soon be at work in St. Paul.

At the Wyoming, Minn., facility — the North American headquarters of Rosenbauer — the final touches are being put on the truck. It was on display for the first time in St. Paul on Tuesday, outside Mayor Melvin Carter’s budget address in downtown.

It was a warm summer day, but how will an electric fire engine perform on a wintry Minnesota day, when there’s no time to spare in an emergency?

“There’s a lot of validity to those thoughts,” said Todd McBride, Rosenbauer RTX program manager. People may remember seeing news stories about drivers of electric vehicles stranded because their cars wouldn’t start in the cold weather.

But an electric firetruck doesn’t have the same problems because it’s almost always starting from a heated fire station, McBride said. The Rosenbauer RTX electric firetrucks also have a small diesel backup generator, which automatically kicks in if the batteries’ charge is too low.

$1.8M price tag

The firetruck, which the city ordered last year, cost about $1.8 million. A traditional gas or diesel fire engine goes for $800,000 to $1 million, said Assistant St. Paul Fire Chief of Operations Jeramiah Melquist.

The city estimates $25,000 a year in fuel savings and additional savings for maintenance. The RTX comes with a five-year warranty for most of its maintenance. Rosenbauer estimates an RTX will last 12 to 15 years with its initial batteries, which wouldn’t stop working but would lose efficiency, similar to how a cellphone battery doesn’t hold a charge as well as it becomes older.

Environmental factors weren’t the leading design factor for Rosenbauer — the RTX is intended to maneuver better, especially on tight city streets, and to be safer for firefighters getting in and out of it each day, McBride said.

There are two batteries powering the truck. Everyone asks how long they’ll run the truck between charges, though McBride said it’s not a simple answer because it depends on what the truck is doing, such as pumping water from its tank or pumping from a hydrant.

“The difference with a firetruck is it’s not driving from St. Paul to Duluth,” though it could, McBride said. “If you think about what a firetruck does, it typically is sitting in a station ready to go. It’s usually plugged in with the battery being 100%.”

St. Paul firefighters, who are also paramedics and EMTs, handle all emergency medical calls in the city and that’s the majority of what they respond to. For example, they could leave the station with the RTX’s batteries fully charged, drive a mile or two to a call, provide initial emergency care and leave with an ambulance after about 20 minutes to return to the station. That would use 10 percent to 15 percent of the batteries’ power — and it would take 15 to 20 minutes to charge to 100 percent, McBride said.

There’s a 33-gallon fuel tank and, if the batteries get down to 20 percent, the diesel automatically starts up to recharge them, getting back to 80 percent in as little as 30 minutes, McBride said. For large fires that keep firefighters on scene all night, in the winter, it’s expected that the truck would use some diesel for those situations.

In Vancouver, which started its testing phase on its new RTX on May 1 and has responded to about 1,100 calls, the engine has used its batteries 98 percent of the time, which is typical, McBride said. They’ve gone through about 20 gallons of diesel for the truck.

Russ Stark, St. Paul’s chief resilience officer, posted a photo of the new truck on X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday, which was met by skeptical replies about the costs and whether it would work in the cold. He noted the purchase was led by the fire department.

Mike Smith, president of the International Association of Fire Fighters Local 21, said there were questions among some St. Paul firefighters along the lines of, “What if it doesn’t start?” but he said all his concerns were addressed when he and others talked to Rosenbauer officials and saw the truck up close.

‘Fire engine of the future’

Todd McBride, RTX sales and marketing manager for Rosenbauer America, demonstrates the remote control for the top-mounted water cannon on the company’s RTX fire engine in their manufacturing facility in Wyoming, Minn. An array of cameras, instead of mirrors, will help the drivers with their field of vision. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Rosenbauer, which has been building firetrucks since 1866, set out in 2012 to develop “the fire engine of the future,” McBride said. They teamed up with universities to interview fire chiefs, firefighters, fleet mechanics and city administrators around the world to determine “what do they battle on a daily basis?” One of the consistent answers was that firetrucks were getting too big and needed to be more compact and maneuverable for getting around.

The challenge was: How do you make a firetruck narrower when you need room for a powerful engine?

An engineer raised his hand and asked, “What if we did electric?”

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“They kind of laughed at him,” McBride said. “But they had a rule that if somebody put something on the table, they’d talk through it. What happens if we get rid of the transmission, the exhaust system? All of a sudden they started checking a lot of their boxes” to get the truck more ergonomic for firefighters.

Rosenbauer originally marketed its electric trucks to fire departments in Europe, and have sold about 60 on that continent. They’ve also sold their electric trucks to departments in Tokyo, Japan (the largest fire department in the world), Australia and Chile.

The company now has six electric vehicles in service in North America: two in California and four in Canada.

“There are going to be a lot of people in cold climates that are going to look to St. Paul, because there’s this perception that electric vehicles don’t operate well in cold weather,” McBride said, adding that they’ve “done extensive cold weather testing” in cold chambers and Norway.

What makes the truck different

The RTX truck doesn’t have side mirrors — cameras around the truck’s exterior are displayed on screens inside the cab to show the side views, along with what’s below the front and rear bumpers.

The truck is 92.5 inches wide, while most firetrucks are about 100 inches wide, plus side mirrors that add 12 to 14 inches to each side.

It’s lower to the ground and there are stairs inside the truck. For a typical firetruck, a firefighter would have to take a big step up or hoist themselves up to get inside, all while wearing about 75 to 80 pounds of equipment. The lower height to enter the RTX is important to prevent falls when firefighters are rushing out to respond to an emergency, and is also less jarring on their bodies through the years, McBride said.

Adjustable suspension allows the operator to raise the truck higher, creating more ground clearance to get through flooding, for example. It could make it through about 32 inches of floodwater.

It’s all-wheel drive, which isn’t the case for St. Paul’s other fire vehicles, and will be “huge for St. Paul in the wintertime,” McBride said.

Traditional firetrucks have a big, loud engine in the middle of the cab. Without that in the new electric firetruck, firefighters can more easily discuss their plan of attack as they approach a fire or another emergency.

The cab of the Rosenbauer RTX fire engine that is scheduled to go into service in St. Paul by late September. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

If firefighters are coming back from a tragic situation — say they rescued kids from a burning house, but a child didn’t survive — they may not want to talk or look at each other, which is easier to do with the seating and noise in a traditional firetruck. With the more open layout of the new firetruck, “it’s designed to help promote communication,” which is important because mental health and PTSD are concerns for first responders, McBride said.

There’s also a cleaning station on the side of the truck, which allows firefighters to rinse off some contaminants before going back to their station and doing a more complete cleaning. Because of chemicals that firefighters are exposed to, research suggests they are at higher risk of some types of cancers, and cancer is a leading cause of death among firefighters, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

From Austria to Wyoming, Minn.

St. Paul’s truck was built at Rosenbauer’s global headquarters in Austria, traveled by ship to New York and arrived by truck to Wyoming, Minn., in late July.

There, Rosenbauer works with fire departments to customize the trucks, including such details as the layout of storage for firefighting equipment.

Last week at the Wyoming facility, Daniel Marosok, RTX assembly technician, lined a shelf inside a compartment on the St. Paul firetruck’s side with a waterproof vinyl mat. He worked from measurements he’d written down in advance. “I have to give myself a little sketch so I remember which way I need it oriented,” said Marosok, who worked as a finish carpenter before going to work at Rosenbauer about a year and a half ago.

On the truck’s other side, behind a roll-up door, Marosok had already installed heavy-duty clips on the back wall to hang bolt cutters. He put in a series of brackets on the floor to keep buckets and orange traffic cones from sliding around while the truck is in motion.

Putting together all the behind-the-scene parts is like playing the game Tetris, Marosok said. “I consider myself to be a good problem solver.”

Roseville and Superior, Wis., also each recently ordered a Rosenbauer electric firetruck, which will likely be delivered next year.

REV Fire Group and Pierce Manufacturing, which is based in Appleton, Wis., also make electric firetrucks.

After St. Paul’s truck was on display downtown Tuesday, McBride brought it back to the Wyoming facility, where there will be testing and more finishing touches. The fire department hopes to have it on display again at the Governor’s Fire Prevention Day at the Minnesota State Fair on Aug. 23.

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Then, St. Paul fire equipment operators will be trained in operating the new vehicle in September and the department aims to have it ready to go by the start of October.

It will initially serve as an additional engine at Station 1 at West Seventh Street and Randolph Avenue. When construction on the new Station 7 is completed at Ross Avenue between Earl and East Seventh streets, that will be the fire engine’s permanent home.

The fire department tried to get a federal grant for the truck, but wasn’t able to; it was funded through the city and the fire department over two years, Assistant Chief Melquist said. If everything goes well with the new truck and they keep seeing the potential for savings, the department will look into grants in the future for another electric firetruck.