HELENA, Mont. -- Two federal fire trucks on their way to Montana's Bitterroot Valley were ticketed in Idaho for weight violations, one of the drivers says.
The drivers, who work for the Bureau of Land Management, also had to unload some of the water before they could continue.
"There will be enough Cain raised over this someone is going to wish it never happened," driver Keith Walton of Salem, Ore., said late Monday.
Mark Snider, spokesman for Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, said on Wednesday that the state Transportation Department was contacted as soon as the governor became aware of the incident.
"We asked them to show the proper sensitivity in this time of emergency," Snider said. "They were following the letter of the law."
After rolling into Idaho following a successful check through an Oregon port, the two fire trucks, both with federal license plates and marked as BLM vehicles, were held for about an hour in Coeur d'Alene while officers at the weigh station discussed the weight violation with their supervisor, Walton said.
The trucks, which are limited to 34,000 pounds at the rear axles, weighed in at about 36,000 and 38,000 pounds.
"The supervisor said 'No exceptions, write them citations,' '' Walton told the Helena Independent Record.
Walton is to appear in court Sept. 5 in Coeur d'Alene. As the driver of the lighter truck, he faces $47.50 in fines and $63.50 in court costs. The other driver could be fined $54 and $63.50 in court costs.
More frustrating to Walton was that the officers also insisted that enough water be dumped from the vehicles to bring them to commercial weight limits as long as they remained in Idaho.
Already the trucks were running just three-quarters full in an attempt to be close to load limits, Walton said. After dumping 6,000 pounds of water from the two trucks, they left about half full, Walton said.
The water is mixed to produce a compressed air foam that is sprayed onto fires. Considering the conditions they were driving past Monday, half-full tanks were not full enough, Walton said.
"We like to travel with enough water to do some serious damage to any fire we run across, and we've already proven that on this trip," Walton said.
This past weekend, the two trucks and their crews were stationed on the Lakeview Fire in Oregon when they received the order to travel to the Blodgett Fire in the Bitterroot.
"About 100 miles out of Lakeview we came upon a growing fire," Walton said. "We used our load of water helping to put it out and then reloaded in the next town."
That, he added, is how it is supposed to work.
"An empty fire truck doesn't do anyone much good," he said.
