Trenton is the state capital of New Jersey and the Mercer County seat. The city has nearly 85,000 residents and is comprised of seven square miles of largely compact residential structures. As the state capital, a large influx of state employees is present Monday through Friday. Trenton also is the home to several federal offices, including a federal courthouse.

The city is located on the Delaware River, so in addition to fire and rescue response, the Trenton Fire Department manages a wide variety of technical responses, including water rescue and recovery.

Established as a volunteer company in 1747, Trenton Fire and Emergency Services is one of the nation’s oldest fire departments. The department is a Level 3 hazmat team for the state of New Jersey. It operates three task forces to handle technical rescue, hazmat, and water search-and-recovery events.
Although most of the department’s work is in the county, the city has a cooperative agreement with surrounding cities to provide mutual aid — including across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania.

To improve its effectiveness, the department recently took delivery of its first-ever mobile command vehicle. The unit will allow specialized teams to manage, organize and monitor incidents for long periods of time, using state-of-the-art communications and surveillance technology.

“We’ve never had a command vehicle, so in past situations where we needed to have a remote command post, we didn’t have a vehicle to stage it in,” said Bttn. Chief W. Graham Smith. “We would be in a car or a rescue apparatus, or we’d try to find a suitable building in the area, but often we were just exposed to the elements, and subject to the distractions and noise outside.”

Smith is the deputy coordinator for emergency management in the city, as well as the director of Trenton Emergency Medical Services. Employed by the city for 26 years, he has risen through its ranks.

The new command vehicle will be critical to the department’s day-to-day operations for large and long-duration fires, as well as extended operations such as hazmat incidents and water rescues.
Department members are looking forward to having a controlled climate and environment where teams can remotely monitor the incident scene – to avoid having to contend with the aforementioned noise distractions.

Trenton’s new Pierce mobile command vehicle is built on a Kenworth T370 chassis and features a 22-foot aluminum command unit body. The unit has a slide-out module that offers enough space for a 5-foot conference table, and a rear area that can be closed off from the rest of the unit for private conferences.

The command vehicle was purchased with a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, though some money was used to hire a consultant who worked with emergency management staff to rewrite the city’s emergency operations plan and to upgrade its emergency operations equipment.

According to Smith, the mobile command vehicle will make the department more efficient and effective in protecting people and property within its operations area. The hybrid vehicle also will use less fuel than comparable diesel-only vehicles.

“[It] will be a tremendous benefit on longer-duration events and at remote locations outside of the city,” Smith said. “The vehicle has an excellent communications system, so we can move it to a remote location and have it serve as a command post … we wouldn’t necessarily have to operate from our emergency operations center here at fire headquarters.”

A camera mounted on a 30-foot mast can monitor scenes in remote locations and provide the video feed into the vehicle, where it can be displayed on screens. As a result, personnel can assess an emergency scene without having to step out of the truck, and incidents can be digitally recorded from start to finish.

An interoperable, Internet-based communications system not only allows different and otherwise incompatible radio systems to seamlessly connect with each other, but also brings in video feeds. Personnel also can integrate cell-phone feeds to allow multiple personnel from various departments to speak with each other.

Two or three people comfortably can operate in the communications area, and there are four workstations in the command area of the vehicle. A removable table can be installed for staff meetings, so that five to six people can be seated comfortably in the command area. With the slide-out deployed, up to 10 people can work or meet in the command vehicle at the scene of an incident, in a controlled environment.

The command vehicle also is satellite phone and TV capable. All of the wide screens are networked to all of the workstations, so personnel can feed anything into the monitors mounted throughout the vehicle.

“The mobile command vehicle will be an excellent addition to the department’s fleet to support all major events. It’s hard to know how often it’ll be called on because the incidents are never predictable, but I’d say on average, probably a couple times a month,” Smith said. “This unit will keep Trenton command out of the rain in a controlled and efficient environment, while helping reduce the department’s environmental footprint.”

A sales and engineering team from Pierce and local dealer Fire & Safety Services of South Plainfield, N.J., helped Smith and Bttn. Chief Todd Fell determine some of the technology that they wanted to put on the vehicle, and worked with them to develop the vehicle specifications. Smith and Fell met with members of Pierce and Fire & Safety throughout the preconstruction, build and delivery processes. Each week, Pierce provided Smith with photos of the vehicle, so that he and his staff could see it develop into a one-of-a-kind command vehicle.

Mechanical and electronics training on the vehicle has been completed. However, Smith plans to repeat the mechanical training on a “train the trainer” basis to spread the knowledge, so that everyone can at least operate the vehicle to bring it to an incident scene. Then, individuals who have had the electronics training would undertake vehicle operations at an incident.

“Having the mobile command vehicle will facilitate a more efficient operation of our command staff which, of course, is required by the National Incident Management System,” Smith said. “This vehicle — with its excellent communications capability — will allow command staff to operate in a more controlled environment with the tools necessary to get the job done efficiently.”

Tom Brandes is a freelance writer specializing in the fire and emergency services sector.

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