Jersey Journal (New Jersey)
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BAYONNE, N.J. — Want to buy an old fire rig?

If the City Council goes along, the Bayonne Fire Department plans to auction off four of its oldest pieces of apparatus to the highest bidder(s).

Fire Chief Patrick Boyle said he's proposing to sell a 1979 tower ladder truck with bucket and three 1986 rigs - a 100-foot aerial ladder truck and two 1,250-gallons-per-minute pumpers.

The city paid $213,000 for the tower ladder, $240,000 for the 100-foot aerial truck and $125,000 apiece for the pumpers, city records show.

Boyle said no minimum prices would be set. "The people interested in these items tend to want to cannibalize them for parts," he said.

Boyle said the rigs have been out of active service at least two years and that, at this point, it no longer pays to keep them even as backup apparatus because the cost of maintaining them exceeds their service value.

Boyle said that toward the end of their service "when a breakdown occurred, it was difficult to get spare parts and, at times, we'd gone to machine shops to get parts rebuilt because those parts were no longer in stock."

Boyle said the department still has among its rolling stock a 1989 tower ladder truck at its Fourth Street firehouse, and, at the Peninsula firehouse, a 1995 pumper, inherited from the Army when there was still a federal presence at the Peninsula, then known as the U.S. Military Ocean Terminal.

At its meeting the City Council will be asked to green-light the departmental auction.