A couple of City firefighters today had Ladder 15 in the parking lot of Yancey's Fancy on Evans Street to practice with one of the truck's unusual capabilities, lifting the front wheels off the ground.
Typically, if firefighters wanted to swing the bucket to the rear of the truck and lower it to the ground, the negative angle would only be 5 percent. With wheels up, the bucket can reach a negative angle of 20 percent.
That might come in handy if the bucket was needed, say, to rescue somebody from Tonawanda Creek, or down in a gully or any situation where the truck was being used on a slope and the bucket needed to be lowered to the ground. The old Ladder 15 didn't have a frame strong enough to handle this maneuver.
