The city’s newest fire engine rolled into its bay by half a dozen firefighters and city council members Thursday morning, as part in a traditional push-in ceremony. The moment marked the arrival of the first of three new apparatus for the Niceville Fire Department.
The engine is hard to miss. Against a field of red rigs across the region, Niceville’s is black.
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“It is definitely unique. You don’t see a lot of black fire engines running around this area for sure,” Fire Chief Alex Kukulus said. When the department planned the new apparatus order, he said he handed the decision to his crews. “I empowered people that work here to choose what they wanted to. So I think it was a little bit of just their taste and what they wanted. But I think more than anything, they were marking sort of a new chapter for our fire department.”
That chapter, he said, has been two decades in the making. “This was largely a volunteer organization about 20 years ago, and now it’s all professional, very highly trained folks.” Between the new emblem, the new color scheme and the coming shift in medical capability, he said, “it’s a new day for Niceville Fire.”
Three trucks instead of one
The engine is the result of a budget decision the city made instead of buying a new tower truck. Councilman Doug Stauffer said the tower under consideration carried a price tag of roughly $2.2 million. The engine came in at around $1 million.
“So we got three instead of one,” Stauffer said. “And we don’t need a second tower truck probably for a couple of years, when that one will be retired.”
The other two vehicles — a rescue truck outfitted with extrication equipment for vehicle accidents, and a brush truck — are expected to arrive next month, all funded from the money that had been set aside for the tower.
Stauffer credited Kukulus with driving the change. “I’m glad the chief came in, and he’s very proactive. He knew what needed to be done, and he did it and pulled it off.”
Quicker life support response in the city
Lettering on the engine’s side reads paramedic, and that word carries most of the purchase’s operational weight. The department is moving to an Advanced Life Support configuration, with four paramedics in training.
“Like most fire departments, 85-plus percent of our call volume is medically related,” Kukulus said, noting Niceville is “actually one of the latter ones to join the party” among area agencies. The engine will carry “all the same equipment, drugs, medications and abilities that the paramedics and the ambulances have, minus a gurney” — enough, he said, to stabilize a patient and begin interventions when the ambulance system is stretched thin. Stauffer described it as “a rolling ambulance, as he said, without the gurney.”
Stauffer argued the investment pays for itself in ways residents may not see directly: “I think insurance rates will go down, or at least stay stable, because you have the mechanisms to save lives, get to fires, and have good response time.”
Brush busters
For Kukulus, who came to Florida from Nevada, the brush truck was “a huge addition.” Niceville sits surrounded on three sides by the Eglin Range – easy prey for a wildfire.
“To me, it’s just a matter of time until something rolls off that, and we’ll be better equipped for it,” he said. Crews will train on the brush truck over the winter to be ready for next fire season — and, he added, to deploy beyond the region. The department sent rigs to Texas in recent weeks. “I’m going to have them prepared to deploy nationally and assist other agencies as well.”
