Fire truck rental service debuts, experts concerned

As Sonoma Valley and the broader county face the prospect of another long and significant fire season, a Bay Area company is offering a controversial service to private individuals, wineries and other businesses: Leasing or buying a fire truck.

Pacific Highway Rentals, a Hayward company, is renting and selling Type 6 fire trucks – vehicles around the size of a small pickup truck with a pump on the back ‒ with a 300-gallon tank capacity, hose reel and foam system. The trucks rent for around $300 a day and about $3,500 a month, and cost about $175,000 to $300,000 to purchase.

Additionally, customers can opt for onsite training from a retired Cal Fire battalion chief for an extra fee.

While the rental company has been around for 19 years, Pacific Highway Rentals only started renting fire trucks recently. The service debuted at the Sonoma Raceway June 5 and 6 at the raceway’s once-a-year NASCAR event. The raceway rented two fire trucks from Pacific Highway Rentals in addition to the four fire trucks that are always ready to go at the track.

The raceway’s crew handled the equipment without additional training, said Gail Cunningham, the raceway’s operations manager. “Our crews have many years of experience. The kind of fire that would spring up at a track is pretty specialized,” Cunningham said.

Cunningham said her crew has Firefighter 1 certification and receives biannual training. Firefighter 1 certification qualifies individuals to perform at the entry level in a volunteer or paid fire department as firefighters in California.

No fires broke out during the event, Cunningham said. She said she would rent fire trucks from the company again.

Firefighting experts expressed concerns about the service.

“We understand peoples’ right to protect their property, but we don’t condone them fighting fires because they haven’t had the necessary training and the proper equipment needed to fight wildland fires,” said Lynnette Round, an information officer for Cal Fire.

Spencer Andreis, a battalion chief with Sonoma Valley Fire, said, “They (people renting the trucks) are potentially operating in harm’s way and don’t have experience with fire behavior.

“They don’t have the expertise or specialized training to know where they should be placing their apparatus, and if and when they should potentially disengage from a fire fight,” the battalion chief said.

Rather than trying to handle a fire themselves, property owners should adhere to evacuation warnings and orders so firefighters can safely do their jobs, the battalion chief said.

“When people try to take independent action on their properties, it takes away from our ability to suppress the fire. Our focus becomes life safety and we have to deviate from fire suppression,” Andreis said.

Sonoma County Fire District Chief Mark Heine, a board member of the California Fire Chiefs Association, said, “There are a few of these (fire truck rental) companies that are starting to pop up in this state and other states. It’s an extremely dangerous endeavor.”

“Even if (the customers) have some training, these fires around here are burning at an intensity I haven’t seen in 40 years. To equip these people with a minimal firefighting tool and minimal training and ask them to take a stand to fight these wildfires is a setup for disaster,” Heine said.

“It’s a bad situation all around. They (rental customers) are not on our radio channels; they are not trained with us; they are not part of the training workforce.

“It’s a setup. Somebody is going to get injured or killed,” Heine said.

In response, Paul Indelicato, owner of Pacific Highway Rentals, said, “I completely agree with the firefighters you talked to. People shouldn’t make a stand against a wildfire.

“That’s not the intention. The intention is small spot fires that might start miles from the main fire,” Indelicato said.

“This is if the wind blows embers from a fire five or six miles away on your property and starts a small fire. This is a good tool to put that out. Your first call should be to the fire department to say this is what’s happening,” the business owner said.

“A couple wineries I’ve talked to said when the fires blew through last year in 2020 they were more or less on their own for the first 12 hours because all available firefighters were at the main blaze,” the rental agency owner said.

“They had spot fires starting on their property for a week or two. They were out with buckets of water or whatever they could find, trying to extinguish flames by themselves with whatever they could,” he said.

Indelicato has arranged with Scott Watson of Watson Fire Training & Vegetation Management, a retired Cal Fire battalion chief, to provide training if requested. So far, Watson said, he has not trained any Pacific Highway Rental customers.

“I would never claim that I’m training firefighters to go out and fight forest fires. That is the furthest from my intent,” said Watson, who declined to give the cost of the training. He said the training is 40 hours, and generally he would conduct the training himself.

“I’m training people to get water out of the response vehicle on their property and protect their property,” Watson said.

Some areas covered by the training would be when it’s appropriate to stay and when to leave – entrapment avoidance – and how to follow the expectations of the incident commander and the operations section chiefs, Watson said.

“A fire truck is a tool just like a fire extinguisher and people should be trained how to properly use fire extinguishers,” Watson said.

“I agree with the chief 100 percent. We try to give them the power of knowledge so they can use this tool appropriately and know when to stay and when to leave,” Watson said