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Trumbull commissioners hoping to find a way to keep Hovercraft
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
The Trumbull County commissioners are not ready to donate the hovercraft the county acquired in 2012 with federal Homeland Security money despite problems with maintenance and training for the device.
It hovers on water and ice and can be used in ways a typical boat cannot.
Bazetta Township Fire Chief Dennis Lewis told the commissioners Tuesday it has become too expensive for the township to continue keeping the emergency-rescue device because of maintenance and training costs.
It has been operated by the Bazetta Fire Department, and three township firefighters were trained in its operations.
Bazetta was thought to be the place the hovercraft could most effectively be used for ice rescues on Mosquito Lake.
But it has never been used for an ice rescue, Lewis said. It has been used for water rescues twice – on the Mahoning River in Warren in July 2013 and once when duck hunters got trapped on the Grand River in 2014.
It was damaged in the Mahoning River rescue, when floodwaters rose on the river. The Bazetta Fire Department responded with the hovercraft to the Packard Park area to rescue two men who floated down the river from Leavittsburg in a canoe and raft and got trapped.
It took more than three hours to rescue both men. The hovercraft was used to save the second man, who was trapped against a tree until 10:48 p.m.
But when the firefighters were leaving the river, they hit something concrete in the river the driver could not see, Lewis said. The craft also was damaged once in training.
“Its easy to damage,” said Linda Beil, the county’s emergency management director, who acquired the Homeland Security grant that paid for the $47,000 craft. “It’s as hard as driving a helicopter,” she added. “It has been sitting a year, unused.”
It is housed at the EMA offices on North River Road.
Lewis said the township cannot afford another $11,000 to train one driver on each of three shifts to drive it.
Beil has contacted several agencies, including the Mahoning, Ashtabula and Summit counties EMAs, and Summit County is interested in taking it, she said.
Commissioner Frank Fuda said it wouldn’t be right to give the hovercraft away after working so hard to get it and having so many people express such a strong desire to have it.