The last year has seen several fire and rescue services around the UK take delivery of specially-equipped Mercedes Sprinter vans.
My local fire station (in North Yorkshire) has one, and Staffordshire Fire & Rescue service has recently taken delivery of two further Targeted Response Vehicles (TRV), as they are known.
- Mercedes Sprinter TRV
The vehicles carry 800 litres of water and are specially equipped to deal with small fires such as grass and bin fires.
According to Staffordshire Fire & Rescue Service Chief Fire Officer Peter Dartford, the TRVs have been extremely successful at dealing with such incidents. “Unfortunately a large proportion of fires we attend to now are small, deliberately started fires – this new vehicle has been purposely designed to deal with these types of incidents, particularly as it can get to areas where a normal fire appliance wouldn’t be able to access.”
These latest two vehicles were ordered following the success of Staffordshire’s first TRV, based at Stoke-on-Trent which dealt with 346 incidents during its first six months in service, in 2007. This freed up larger, traditional fire appliances to attend more serious incidents and improved the fire service’s ability to access difficult or remote locations.
Update: Avon Fire & Rescue Service are also using Mercedes Sprinters – but in a completely different way, creating smaller conventional fire appliances from crew-cabbed Sprinter chassis with custom-built bodies. Click here for the full story.