Stillwater Fire Department Shows Off its Retrofit Boston Whaler

With a walleye chop on the St. Croix River Thursday morning, the showed off their newest water rescue tool: a completely retrofitted 24-foot Boston Whaler.

Three years ago, the Minnesota DNR offered the fire department an excess Coast Guard boat that had been sitting on a trailer in northern Minnesota for five years.

The boat actually had weeds growing on it when Stillwater firefighters got their hands on it, Fire Chief Stu Glaser said. “We thought, here’s a diamond in the rough. Let’s try to make this useable and functional for the Stillwater Fire Department.”

With 10,000 people on the river on any given weekend, this was “quite the resource” for the fire department to get their hands on and get put back together, Glaser said.

“The St. Croix can be a city on to itself when things get hopping after Memorial Day,” he said. “We have a lot of potential hazards on the riverway.”

The retrofit fire rescue boat features twin Mercury 225 motors, two water suppression lines that can pump 500 gallons of water onto a blaze each minute and enough space for 17 people to respond to an incident.

Until now, the department responded to river calls with a 14 foot flat-bottom boat that could carry three people and lacked fire suppression capabilities.

That boat could get a small crew out to a scene, but it wasn’t real good for transporting patients or medical staff, Deputy Fire Chief Tom Ballis said. That boat will still be used for the dive team and water rescue incidents on area lakes.

New Tool Already Put to Use

As firefighters were preparing the boat on Tuesday night for this week’s public demonstration, Ballis said firefighters came across a stranded boater. The crew hooked the boat up and towed it in to .

“That’s the stuff that happens regularly,” Ballis said. “It’s not the extravagant river rescue or boat accident, it’s the day-to-day stuff—it’s getting to boaters and all the medical calls we get to assist campers on the island.”

The new boat also allows firefighters to attack fires from the water in support of land operations.

In the case of a fire at a marina, on the or an incident at the Alan S. King plant, Andersen Windows or the new bridge, crews can now fight the blaze from the water, Ballis said. The boat can also be used as a draft point to push water from the river to the pumper trucks in the case of a major fire downtown.

“The biggest thing,” Ballis said,” is that this boat allows us to get out to the scene and provide patient care and fire suppression quickly.”

By the Numbers:

• Stillwater Fire Department responds to incidents on 7.5 miles of the St. Croix River
• With mutual-aid agreements, the department may respond to calls covering 22.5 miles of the river
• There are 1,400 boat slips in Stillwater and 15 public marinas
• About 500 boats per day launch onto the St. Croix from Stillwater
• The Andiamo Show Boats can carry up to 1,750 passengers per trip and provide about 1 million passenger trips each year