Kentucky fireboat gets a permanent home

Written by Marine Log Staff
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Covington's Fireboat I

The City of Covington, Ky., reports that its 35 ft fireboat is to get a new, permanent home.

Covington’s Fire Boat 1 — powered by two 300-horsepower Evinrude E-TEC engines and mounting a 1,000 gallon-per-minute fire pump — has been dispatched 18 times already this year for emergencies on the Ohio and Licking rivers.

“With rivers on two of Covington’s borders, it’s a critical piece of equipment, and one we need to be able to get into service quickly,” Covington Fire Chief Mark Pierce said.

Unfortunately, the boat has never had a permanent home, moving around since its arrival in 2010 among several docks, including its current temporary mooring at the BB Riverboats dock in Newport, courtesy of the Bernstein family.

Now though, using a $75,000 Port Security grant andand a $25,000 City match, the department is “buying” a home on a soon-to-be-built dock near Smale Park in Cincinnati, just across the Ohio River.

The dock will give the Covington’s Fire Department boat two big advantages.

Firefighters will be able to get to the new dock quicker than they can to the boat’s current location. And it will have better access to electricity and other maintenance equipment needed to do things like charge batteries and heaters, said Pierce.

Covington’s boat is one of several to patrol this section of the Ohio and Licking rivers, and “at one time was the largest boat here,” Pierce said. The department also has a much smaller inflatable Zodiac Milpro ERB 380 for quick response on not just the rivers but also Banklick Creek, ponds and lakes.

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