Topley fire department gets a new truck

The 2025 Liberator replaces the department's 2007 main truck

Topley fire department gets a new truck Published 1:42 pm Wednesday, July 15, 2026 The Topley Volunteer Fire and Rescue Department followed a tradition more than a century old when members welcomed a new fire truck. The tradition, called a push in, dates back to the 1880s in North America when horses returning from a call were were unable to back into fire stations.

Firefighters then pushed in the equipment themselves and when motors replaced horses, firefighters made a push in the tradition whenever a new piece of equipment was purchased. The new truck, No. 12, is a 2025 Liberator placed on a Freightliner chassis and manufactured by Fort Garry Fire Trucks of Winnipeg. It cost $680,000, taxes included, and was paid for by the annual $2.8 million grant the Regional District of Bulkley-Nechako receives through the provincial government’s Northwest BC Regional Benefits Alliance grant.

“We invited the public out to watch us do it so they can see the new truck and ask questions,” said Topley department assistant chief Glenn Kelly. “We had a little bit of an open house.” Kelly said this new truck, which will be the department’s main responder, arrives just as the department’s former main truck times out based on fire equipment regulation requirements.

“You can have them for 20 years and ours is a 2007. At 20 years they can’t be your main truck anymore. They can be your second truck, but not your main truck,” he said.

The Liberator has a 900-gallon tank and comes with a foam disbursing system Kelly said is ideal if responding to vehicle or industrial fires. “We’re using foam on just about everything,” said Kelly, saying its efficiency is such that one gallon of foam is equal to many times its water volume equivalent. The ability to respond quickly once arriving at a scene comes from being able to run four lines from the tank, he added.

The Liberator carries five firefighters, two in front and three in the back, which is the same capacity as the truck it is replacing. “But the big thing now is something we never had in our other truck. All firefighters can now wear headphones so you have communication within the cab amongst members without the noise of sirens when you’re going down the road,” Kelly said.

The driver and front seat firefighter can even tune out the rear-seat firefighters in case they need in-depth conversation with the emergency dispatcher. “We’re pretty happy to have it,” Kelly said. “Now that we have our new truck and we’ve got our old truck, which is every bit as good as most trucks out there, we’ve got a lot of equipment to fight fires now.”

He said that having a new fire truck can even encourage more people to consider joining the department. With this new main truck and the former main truck, the department was able to dispose of the department’s oldest truck. “We had a 1984 Ford cabover.

It was a great truck, served us very well,” said Kelly. It went to a company called Northern Fire Apparatus in return for pump servicing.