There are tens of thousands of aerial apparatus in service in the United States, and every department has its own take on how they are used in the fleet. Standards and guidelines exist to keep everyone safe, and prudent fire chiefs make sure operators are well versed in them, but there is room for ingenuity in aerial use.

One northern New Hampshire department has trained on using its aerial as a boom to help extricate obese medical patients from multistory buildings. A department in Pennsylvania uses its aerial as a decontamination station, the platform nozzles its shower heads. A volunteer department in Minnesota uses its aerial to illuminate night scenes and to give incident commanders bird's eye views of scenes for size up and strategizing.

Then there's traditional rescues of people from burning buildings, like the one firefighters in Washington, D.C., effected to boisterous applause from the gathered onlookers on the sidewalk below.

Joseph Mercieri has first-hand experience helping to extricate a 500-pound woman with a cardiac emergency from a multistory building with hallways too narrow to accommodate her and the cot. When he was with the Bristol (Conn.) Fire Department, he had his crews take out the window and its casing, and made a rigging system and boom, using the 80-foot Pierce aerial like a crane to extract her from the 3-story apartment building and lower her to an awaiting ambulance.

"It worked extraordinarily well," Mercieri says. "We had trained for just that scenario, and it did what we wanted to do."

He was so impressed with the technique, Mercieri took it with him when he took command of the Littleton (N.H.) Fire Department. His staff of eight career firefighters and about a dozen call members train on how to use his department's American LaFrance 100-foot straight-stick aerial as a boom to assist with EMS calls.

"We practice proper rigging for using our aerial like a boom," Mercieri says. "Some manufacturers want you to attach webbing to the rails and not the rungs, so you have to know your aerial's capabilities."

The boom technique also proved useful in rescuing an arborist pinned by a 3-foot-diameter limb high in the tree. Firefighters used the aerial to swing the limb away from the pinned man and lower it safely to the ground, freeing him and allowing rescuers to extricate him.

While Mercieri has yet to employ the boom technique in Littleton, he has used the aerial for an effective water rescue. Rescuers used the aerial for access to the banks of a swift river in which a young child had been stranded on rocks. Rescuers placed the aerial down the river bank, over rugged terrain providing egress to an area from which they could deploy.

Littleton firefighters also use their aerial for anchoring points for rope work. Deployed stabilizers, or outriggers, make excellent places from which to secure webbing and ropes for high-angle and below-grade rescues.

Littleton's aerial is dispatched on first-alarm structure fires, box alarms, water and technical rescues, and motor-vehicle accidents, but not for lane blocking. "We have state police for that," Mercieri says.

The Leo Fire Company in Red Lion, Pa., has a 2002 KME Aerialcat 95-foot mid-mount platform in its fleet. Joe Yahnke is the deputy chief of the all-volunteer department south of York.

"We've figured out a way to create a decon shower area with our aerial," Yahnke says. "We swing it out to the side, leaving it about five or six feet off the ground and put about 20 to 30 psi to the nozzles on the basket."

The low pressure to the nozzle on the bottom of the platform creates a comfortable shower and the water can be warm if the unit supplying the aerial is moving a lot of water.

"We've also figured that we could create a private shower area by hooking up tarps to the basket, like shower curtains," Yahnke says. Fortunately, the department has not had to perform that task, except in training.

Red Lion's aerial is a first-due unit on all structure fires and a second-due unit on all residential and industrial accidents. It also responds to school bus and public-transit vehicle accidents. The KME aerial doesn't have a pump, so its crew performs as a truck company, laddering the roof and providing ventilation chores.

Yahnke is also a career firefighter with the West York (Pa.) Fire Department, where he operates a 1997 E-ONE Cyclone II 75-foot rear-mount quint. Its mission and operations are very different than the aerial he uses in Red Lion. The apparatus doubles as a pumper, which doubles the work for Yahnke, who must keep water to the attack lines and deploy the aerial at the same time.

"It's a totally different ballgame," he says, noting that for staffing, the do-it-all apparatus works because it can operate as just a pumper when necessary.

Firefighters with the Burbank (Ill.) Fire Department also run an aerial with a pump, a 1,500-gpm unit, on a 103-foot straight-stick ladder built by Crimson Fire. Rick Page is an engineer for the Burbank department and helped specify and design the new aerial, which replaced a 1970 Sutphen that had given decades of good service.

Burbank's aerial also replaced a pumper and is a first due on virtually every call the department has, including "chasing ambulances" for EMS runs, Page says. And with a full complement of Hurst extrication tools, including two pre-connected on 100-foot reels, it responds to auto accidents as well.

"For the ISO ratings, we made it a full-response unit," Page says. "We have an apparatus with a pump, so it can be a fire engine … but its primary goal is rescue and ventilation."

As a suburban community of Chicago, Burbank is primarily residential with only a couple of 5-story commercial buildings. But the town has homes set back 30 or more feet from the road, making the 103-foot unit necessary to reach the peaks of larger homes, Page says.

The Lindstrom (Minn.) Fire Department has a 104-foot unit built by Rosenbauer. Like Burbank, Lindstrom bought its tall aerial because of residential setbacks from hard-surfaced roads, says Scott Sellman, chief of the all-volunteer fire department.

"We also bought it for future growth in the community," Sellman says. A recent structure fire in a 3-story home sitting on a hill proved the worth of the extra length, Sellman says.

The rural residential town previously had a Snorkel apparatus with a platform, so the department decided to order its 2007 model with a basket as well.

A platform also has proved to be a valuable tool for incident command, Sellman says.

"When we go on mutual-aid fires, often the incident commander wants to go up and get an overall view of the scene so he can call the shots and see what resources he might need," Sellman says, noting that he too occasionally will take a trip up the aerial to get another perspective. "[But] I'm more of an on-the-ground, hands-on kind of guy," he says.

One of the most unusual features of Lindstrom's aerial is the compressed-air foam available through the aerial waterway. Sellman says it was one of the first aerials ever to have that capacity.

"We had the option of doing that, so we went ahead and did it," Sellman says, noting that the platform is plumbed with a 1ⁱ-inch discharge for deployment of a handline from the platform, if necessary.

An onboard generator that powers the CAF system compressor also powers several lights on the basket, which Lindstrom has deployed to help illuminate nighttime accident scenes as well as fire scenes of their own and neighboring towns.

"It works pretty well for us," says Sellman, who is the commander of 25 volunteers answering about 70 calls annually.

The District of Columbia Fire Department is exponentially larger than the Lindstrom Fire Department. It has 16 aerials in its fleet and firefighters in the thousands who answer an average of 415 calls per day. On a day like Jan. 20, the day President Barack Obama was inaugurated, the department responded to 2,100 calls, an amount Lindstrom would answer over the next 30 years. But there was one day that D.C. Fire Chief Dennis Rubin will never forget: Aug. 18, 2007.

"It was a Saturday, a bright, gorgeous sunny day," says Rubin, remembering a confirmed structure fire call in an 8-story on Rhode Island Avenue. "There was a man trapped on the eighth floor on the D-side."

Rubin responded and "blended in" with the troops that reported to the incident commander to lend his assistance where needed.

Tower 3, a 2005 Seagrave 100-foot platform pulled up on the scene and the driver expertly placed the aerial to rescue the trapped man.

"It was an awesome scene, watching that aerial swing around, scooting up through three full-grown trees and making it to the window," Rubin says. "They did it with such fluid motion. … When they got the man down, the crowd broke out into loud, boisterous applause like nothing I've seen in my 38 years in the service."

The man, who was bloodied and severely burned over 60% of his body, spent four months in Washington Hospital's burn center.

"It was a tremendous effort, and a life was spared because of it," Rubin says, noting the rescue was recorded by spectators and it endures on the Internet on sites like YouTube. The crew making the rescue was recognized with the department's most prestigious award.

"They didn't have an inch to spare, or a second to lose," Rubin says. "They stayed focused. It was one of those times when all the training and all the experience came together. And that's what it's all about."

Ed Ballam is a freelance writer.

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