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.
