 RCAF
STATION EDMONTON - As Ft St John closed out in the summer of 1950, I wound
up at RCAF Stn Edmonton. Our first NCO I/C Fire Hall (Lord I hate that term) was
F/S Bob Edwards. The fire hall bulged with mobile fire equipment, most of it ex
USAF. The most impressive vehicle was the Class 155 Crash Truck. It
was massive. It carried 1000 US gallons of water, some 200 gallons of foam and
had two hand operated turrets mounted on the top deck. We also had a light Class
125 Crash Truck and a USAF pumper. Altogether we had more vehicles than we had
personnel on shift to man them. A story that went the rounds concerned a visitor
who queried F/S Edwards on how he managed to man them during an alarm. His
answer was a classic "Oh, we just double up and each man takes two."
There was plenty of ex USAF small equipment and we experimented with various
nozzles on the 155. The fire hall was on the flight line which gave us an
excellent view of flying operations. As Edmonton had a CEPE detachment, we saw
some pretty exotic "birds", both RCAF and USAF. We worked the standard
24 on and 24 off with the odd shift off on a weekend, giving us a so called 72.
One man was always on night rounds as we were responsible for closing up all the
messes and inspecting various other buildings after lights out. One usually
spent a good part of the next 24 hours off catching up on his sleep. Being a
Crew Chief did'nt mean one got off these night inspections. When F/S Edwards
moved over to NWAC Air Command he was replaced by Sgt Remple as NCO I/C Fire
hall. Late in 1951 we received the first of the new breed of post war fire
trucks. This was the G-9 pumper. Produced by Seagrave, its main drawback was its
pumping capacity of only 500 GPM.
By Phil Brown, Major, Retired
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