Goodbye to the Margaritaville

I don't know how Wolfskin fire chief Ed ran across this little neon amusement, but we hung it on the door to the Margaritaville bay a couple of years ago. Googling shows it may have a connection to Jimmy Buffett, complete with parrot, but we'd named our beloved pumper long before any such discovery. It's a fitting introduction to the end of a long relationship.



For those who don't know who the Margaritaville is, she's our old pumper that we leased from Oconee County many years ago. She's a 1984 GMC/Chevy (thanks Brian!) with a somewhat checkered past. You can see why we call her the Margaritaville. The unconventional paint job was due to an earlier idea that lime green would be more visible than red, without the distraction to passersby. That idea seemed to go by the wayside fairly quickly.

She's been featured many times, for instance, here, or here and certainly no one in any of our 13 fire departments mistakes her for some other pumper. She's been a faithful and well-used engine and has taken us to many fire scenes.

But over the past couple of years she's become intermittently cranky. Or rather the reverse, since electrical problems that have plagued her for years have led to an increasing frequency of dead batteries and nonstarts. Wolfskin residents should know that a few WFD firefighters have spent a lot of time going back and forth to the station to hook up and unhook battery chargers to make sure she's startable. (Once she starts, she went every time!)

But all good things come to an end. It was painful to have to remove the decals that we took such pleasure in applying. Could anyone emote such sadness at a distance as Josh does here? I don't think so. Good job!



So it was that yesterday we said goodbye to our old Margaritaville. Ed, Josh, Brian, and I arrived at 3:30 last Thursday to begin the stripping process, removing all our equipment. Here's her bay, on the other side of the neon folly, and there are 1200 feet of 1.5 and 3 inch hose lying on the floor of the bay (but you've seen that before, last June, from the other end.

Brian took out our radio, flashlight chargers, and other equipment, and we brought in all the couplings, adapters, SCBAs, and other implements of destruction, and accumulated them in a large pile in the station.

It only took us a couple of hours, and at 5:30 Ed and Brian drove her away into the west for the last time, leaking water in the manner to which we had become accustomed.

And here's her replacement, arriving at 7pm.

By that time the rest of the crew had arrived, and we worked until nearly 10pm putting all the hose back on, and getting a good start on organizing the placement of other equipment. Brian installed the radio and flashlight chargers, tested them out, and found them good. Lisa, Phyllis, Jim, and David helped to get hose back on the truck and make it immediately ready. Glenn had stopped on his way over and picked up sustaining pizza. A merry time was had by all although some of us are going to feel a bit sore today after the monumental effort of taking heavy hose off and then replacing it. We don't do that every day.

The new pumper is actually a "new old" pumper. It's a 1987 Ford, with an FMC chassis, but has been scrupulously cared for. If you didn't know the real age, you'd still be able to figure it out - the side panel controls give it all away.

But it has a 1000-gallon water tank, compared to Mville's 750 gallons, and a good strong pump. And it starts! It has automatic transmission, as opposed to manual, and doesn't tend to run oncoming vehicles off the road by wandering from side to side. I'd argue that Mville was more generous in storage space, and that she had more in the way of strategic outlet ports, but since some of those no longer worked it would be a weak argument.

On the other hand, it doesn't have a personality quite yet, although the brakes are extremely squeaky and may be the nucleus of some kind of notoriety. It's red, of course, and there are those who find this to be a major asset, but I'm going to miss the margarita green.

(There are quite a few folks who worked hard to make sure this happened over the last few months. The new old pumper is a transfer from Oconee County, who values our mutual aid agreement over a section of southeast Oconee County and our responses to their mutual aid calls. The Boards of Commissioners of both Oglethorpe and Oconee County, along with the Oconee County Fire Department, and Fire Chief Bruce Thaxton, worked out the transfer, and we're very grateful to all of them.)