Behind-the-scenes with Minnesota’s first electric firetruck: Designed to be more maneuverable, safer for firefighters

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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.

Letters: Please wake up, fellow Democrats. Cities have limited budgets

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Please wake up, fellow Democrats

As a long-time Macalester-Groveland resident and retired (in 2020) transportation planner, I have always had a fascination with Ayd Mill Road. This roadway was built in the 1960s and was intended to serve as a link between I-35E and I-94. Its overall history is too complicated to go into here; this letter’s focus is the bike/pedestrian trail that was constructed in 2020 between the railroad and the roadway.

In the 2000-teens the surface of Ayd Mill Road was in truly horrible condition. In 2019, the City of St. Paul budgeted $3.5 million for a “mill and overlay” resurface job for the 1.5 mile roadway. These types of projects are quite basic and can be confidently budgeted. Then Mayor Carter introduced a last-minute proposal to add a bike/pedestrian trail to the project. This element greatly increased the complexity of the project from engineering and construction perspectives (much of the existing roadway couldn’t just be resurfaced – it had to be re-designed and reconstructed to accommodate the path). The final cost of the project was $7.5 million.

Aug. 11 was a gorgeous Sunday, cool and sunny – a perfect day to go out biking and/or walking. I traveled the length of Ayd Mill Road three times, once at 8:30 a.m., once at 10:30 a.m., and once at 4 p.m. During these three trips I saw a combined total of one bicyclist using the trail, and no pedestrians. This was consistent with general observations during my routine trips on Ayd Mill Road.

Cities like St. Paul have limited budgets. It is galling to see a piece of public infrastructure (the trail), one which more than doubled the cost of the original project, receive hardly any use. Trail advocates say that the Ayd Mill trail will be used more if a connection to Minneapolis’ Midtown Greenway can be built. This is a huge if – first a river crossing would have to be established and then all sorts of difficult connections between the east bank of the river and the Ayd Mill trail would need to be completed. I wouldn’t bet on it.

For now, the trail is a monument to decision-making which allows naïve idealism and ideology to trample on common sense. Please wake up, fellow Democrats; this is the sort of thing that makes people vote for Donald Trump.

Peter Langworthy, St. Paul

 

Whose small town?

Gov. Tim Walz claims to be an expert on small town America.  I too grew up in a small town, and our perspectives couldn’t be more different.

In Gov. Walz’s small town, “everyone minds their own damn business” (his words, not mine). In my small town, if someone needs a meal, we don’t send them to the school to get a free government meal. Instead, we organize a schedule, and neighbors take turns delivering meals. If a student-aged child shows up at our door asking for money, we don’t offer to help them write a government grant, we buy whatever they are selling whether we need it or not, because supporting our community is our responsibility. And if someone in my small town falls on hard times, they are the first we call to help around the house, to hire for farm work, or to find some other work for them, because that’s what neighbors do. Quite frankly, I find Gov. Walz’s notion of what it means to be a neighbor as weird.

I think Gov. Walz would like my kind of small town. Why doesn’t he join me and JD at the next festival so we can show him what small town neighbors are like? I’ll bring an extra lawn chair for him. It’s our way.

Dewayne Dill, Mendota Heights

 

Twice as hard

As an independent voter I see Donald’s Trump’s job twice as hard as Kamala Harris’s. Where Harris has to simply defeat Trump, Donald Trump has to defeat both Kamala Harris and his own mouth.

John Heller, North St. Paul 

 

Elite education

Democrat VP candidate Tim Walz discredits the ability of Republican VP candidate J.D. Vance to understand the circumstances of our country’s general populace … because Vance is a Yale University Law School graduate.

This prompts recollection of the elite university, education credentials of Minnesota’s U.S. senators.

Amy Klobuchar graduated from Yale University and the University of Chicago Law School.

Tina Smith graduated from Stanford University and the Dartmouth College MBA program.

When Klobuchar and Smith are up for reelection, were Walz to endorse the candidacies of these DFL comrades … it could cross the minds of some Minnesotans that “Walz is weird.”

Gene Delaune, New Brighton

 

80 years ago in St. Paul

I was then 6 years old and in 1944 taken with the sound of our military planes each night.

It was dark and my bedtime then each night. I could hear our B-24 bombers heading to land at our St. Paul Holman airport. I got to love the sounds, thinking we were helping to lessen the war. I found later that each B-24 bomber landing at Holman was being fitted out with the bomber’s machine-gun weaponry. Later that night those same bombers took off for a U.S. port to be shipped both east and west to assist in the war fronts.

Want to hear the airplane roars now? Those sounds can still be heard today as the Minneapolis Airport (MSP) has rerouted their aircraft. Those roaring sounds can be heard on St. Paul’s west side, as the jet aircraft pass over.

Why? MSP airport is doing major runway repair and planes are not where they once were. The low-flying sounds are still heard now, reverberating. The sounds now heard are like those of yesteryear.

I’m thankful it’s runway repair and not more weaponry.

— Tom King, West St. Paul

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Today in History: August 15, Woodstock music festival begins

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Today is Thursday, Aug. 15, the 228th day of 2024. There are 138 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On Aug. 15, 1969, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair opened in upstate New York; more than 460,000 people attended the three-day festival, which would become a watershed event in American music and culture.

Also on this date:

In 1057, Macbeth, King of Scots, was killed in battle by Malcolm, the eldest son of King Duncan, whom Macbeth had slain.

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In 1914, the Panama Canal officially opened as the SS Ancon crossed the just-completed waterway between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

In 1935, humorist Will Rogers and aviator Wiley Post were killed when their airplane crashed near Point Barrow in the Alaska Territory.

In 1947, India gained independence after nearly 200 years of British rule.

In 1961, as workers began constructing a Berlin Wall made of concrete, East German soldier Conrad Schumann leapt to freedom over a tangle of barbed wire.

In 1989, F.W. de Klerk was sworn in as acting president of South Africa, one day after P.W. Botha resigned as the result of a power struggle within the National Party.

In 1998, 29 people were killed by a car bomb that tore apart the center of Omagh (OH’-mah), Northern Ireland; a splinter group calling itself the Real IRA claimed responsibility.

In 2003, bouncing back from the largest blackout in U.S. history, cities from the Midwest to Manhattan restored power to tens of millions of people.

In 2017, President Donald Trump, who’d faced harsh criticism for initially blaming deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia on “many sides,” told reporters that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the confrontation and that groups protesting against the white supremacists were “also very violent.” (In between those statements, at the urging of aides, Trump had offered a more direct condemnation of white supremacists.)

In 2021, the Taliban regained control of the Afghan capital of Kabul after the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country.

Today’s Birthdays:

Actor Jim Dale is 89.
Retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is 86.
U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., is 86.
Author-journalist Linda Ellerbee is 80.
Songwriter Jimmy Webb is 78.
Actor Phyllis Smith is 75.
Britain’s Princess Anne is 74.
Actor Tess Harper is 74.
Actor Zeljko Ivanek (ZEHL’-koh eh-VAHN’-ehk) is 67.
Celebrity chef Tom Colicchio is 62.
Film director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (ihn-YAH’-ee-tu) is 61.
Philanthropist Melinda French Gates is 60.
Actor Debra Messing is 56.
Actor Anthony Anderson is 54.
Actor Ben Affleck is 52.
Olympic gold medal beach volleyball player Kerri Walsh Jennings is 46.
Rock singer Joe Jonas (The Jonas Brothers) is 35.
Actor Jennifer Lawrence is 34.

‘It’s almost as if it’s a slap in the face,’ mother says after son’s killer gets 12½-year prison sentence

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A St. Paul teen has been sentenced to 12½ years in prison for a deadly shooting during a marijuana deal in the city’s Dayton’s Bluff neighborhood.

Deshawn Houston, who turned 18 in June, shot 23-year-old Devon A. Johnson while trying to rob Johnson’s friend during the March 14 drug deal. Johnson, a father of six young children, died of a gunshot wound to the chest.

On Monday, Houston was certified to adult court and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder while committing a felony, admitting that he fired a long-barreled revolver four to five times at Johnson’s SUV as he was driving away. Ramsey County District Judge Jacob Kraus then gave Houston the sentence, which was part of an agreement with the prosecution.

Devon A. Johnson (Courtesy of the family)

Dennis Gerhardstein, spokesman for the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office, said Wednesday the length of the prison term fell within state sentencing guidelines because Houston had no previous felony convictions.

“It’s almost as if it’s a slap in the face,” Johnson’s mother, Monique Johnson, said Wednesday of the sentence. “On one hand, to me, it can never be enough time to spend for my son’s life to be taken. And especially that his life was taken just because someone decided he was going to do it that day.”

The shooting

According to the charges, multiple people called 911 about 11 p.m. on March 14, reporting hearing gunshots, vehicles crashing and two to four people running from the area in Dayton’s Bluff.

Officers found broken glass in the parking lot of Wilson Hi-Rise on Wilson Avenue near Johnson Parkway. There were two vehicles in the area that had heavy front-end damage, and police determined the vehicle that struck them was no longer there.

A short time later and about a mile away, officers saw a Jeep that also had heavy front-end damage and was being driven erratically in the area of Minnehaha Avenue and Frank Street. Officers stopped the vehicle and the driver said his friend had been shot and was in the backseat.

Officers gave CPR to Johnson until St. Paul Fire Department medics arrived. They attempted to resuscitate Johnson, but he was pronounced dead at the scene.

Police found suspected marijuana in plastic bags, a digital scale and $346 in the Jeep, the charges said.

Johnson’s friend later told police he was initially too scared to tell them what happened, but “now wanted to be truthful.” He said a man he communicated with on Facebook Messenger wanted to buy marijuana from him and sent him the address on Wilson Avenue.

Johnson and his friend pulled up. The marijuana buyer approached with someone they didn’t know, who police later identified as Houston.

Johnson’s friend said he and the buyer were talking about the marijuana sale when Houston pointed a gun at him and told him to hand over the marijuana. He said he grabbed the gun when the teen put it in front of his face while pointing it at Johnson, who was the driver. “After a short struggle, the gun went off” while Johnson began to drive away.

Johnson crashed into a couple of vehicles and his friend was able to get the vehicle to stop, put Johnson in the backseat and start to drive him to the hospital.

The buyer later said he’d been trying to digitally send money to Johnson’s friend for the marijuana and didn’t know Houston would try to rob the man and he yelled at him to stop.

Another person, though, told police that the buyer, Houston and two other people “started talking about setting up a robbery.” The person later saw the buyer and described him as “hysterical over what happened.” Houston didn’t return to the apartment where they’d been.

Investigators learned that Houston and another person, who was said to have a long-barreled revolver that Houston used in the shooting, were arrested March 29 in St. Cloud. Law enforcement collected several cellphones and a firearm, which was not a revolver.

St. Paul police tried to talk to Houston and the other person, who “declined to provide substantive statements to investigators,” the court document said.

Houston was originally charged April 23 by juvenile petition with intentional second-degree murder, not premeditated; unintentional second-degree murder while committing a felony; and two counts of attempted second-degree murder.

A mother’s grief

Johnson’s mother said he lived with her in Robbinsdale and had been working as a personal care attendant, taking care of his grandmother and another person.

He had played basketball and football at Minneapolis’ Patrick Henry High School. He signed a letter of intent to attend Mesabi Range College and play football, though he didn’t go because he became a father, his mother said.

She said she is now left with “picking up the pieces,” including raising two of her son’s children that he had custody of and are now ages 5 and 10 months old.

She gave a victim impact statement at Wednesday’s sentencing, telling the court that Houston “not only killed my son that night but he killed a part of all of us in our family.”

She said her grandchildren “will never remember or know their father, will never know the sound of his voice. But more than anything, they will never feel his beating heart.”

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