MOOSIC, Pa. — You expect to find firefighters at a fire department. But what you may not expect to find is a firefighting robot like the one on display at the Greenwood Fire Department in Moosic.
It's called the Super Vac TAF 35 Mobile Firefighting Robot. It's remote-controlled and can pour 1,200 gallons of water a minute on a fire.
"The video surveillance that it has on it also has thermal imaging, so it could help for looking for occupants in the building or looking for hotspots of the fire. right here in Moosic, we are looking at starting just over a million square foot warehouse, so that's a lot of ground to cover," said Buddy Miller, Greenwood Fire Department.
"Sending an unmanned unit in, in the event of a potential collapse hazard, it allows you to get into the deep seed of a fire without endangering some of your firefighter lives," said Dana Shaffer, SuperVac Manufacturing.
Shaffer, who is a salesman for the company, offered to demonstrate the mobile firefighting robot in Moosic. And the chief at Greenwood invited firefighters from other departments in the area to see how it works.
"There's 51 of them in the world currently. This is the first one across the pond in the U.S." said Shaffer.
They saw how it can move across a grassy area and shoot a stream of water from some 75 yards away.
A machine like this may look difficult to drive at first, but just give it a couple of minutes, and anyone can learn how to operate it. Even kids had a go at working the controls.
The mobile firefighting robot costs around $400,000.
"We all wanna go home. At the end of the day, everybody wants to go home safely, so yeah, it's worth the price. It's just a lot of fundraising if we want something like this," said Miller.
While the price tag for Mobile Firefighting Robot may be out of range for an individual fire company such as Greenwood, officials say getting one of the robots could be possible if several fire departments joined together.
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