Roughly 30 years after building its first truck for the Surrey Fire Service, Intercontinental Truck Body is replacing that same truck.
Intercontinental Truck Body (ITB) celebrated its 11,000th custom-built vehicle during a barbecue on site Friday (March 1), and to celebrate, the company used the newly built technical rescue fire truck as its 11,000th build.
ITB, said sales and marketing manager John Van Seters has been in Surrey for 33 years, and it was about 30 years ago that ITB built its first fire truck for the Surrey Fire Service.
“That unit has been in service in Surrey for about 30 years, and it’s being retired. So that is the first fire truck that we’ve built — for the City of Surrey — and it’s worked at Surrey its whole life and now it’s retired,” Van Seters said.
And this new technical rescue truck will be replacing it, he said.
“This is really cool for us because they came back to us to build the replacement for a unit we had built so long ago,” he said.
“Which is really unique because a lot of fire departments who buy locally, eventually grow so big and their budget swells so big that they start to go to the U.S. and buy very expensive fire trucks.”
ITB sales and marketing manager John Van Seters said the company celebrates after every 1,000 units it builds, which takes about two to three years.
When the city chose ITB to build the truck, Van Seters said he didn’t know this truck would be the 11,000th.
“This one just happened to be getting completed at the right time to coincide with it,” he said. “It’s wasn’t sold to be this 11,000th one, it was just fortunate to be it.”
Between the 1988 truck and this new one, Van Seters said there isn’t many differences.
“The original design was really good and it worked really well for them,” said Van Seters, adding this new truck has been simplified even more.
Van Seters said the truck includes storage spaces on the outside, sized for specific equipment, and inside firefighters can prepare for technical rescues.
ITB has been in Surrey for 33 years, Van Seters said, but his grandfather started the business in Alberta 44 years ago. The Cloverdale location was started by Van Seters’ father and uncle, and about five or six years ago Van Seters, along with his brother Nathan and cousin Phil Van Dyke took over the business.