A few photos from our 2013 seminar in Fitzwilliam, NH at the Meadowood Area Fire Department's Fire Training Center. We were so honored to teach at this facility for it had a whole bunch of history for fire service folks throughout New England. We were sorting some photos and found the ones we took of a water transfer set-up we built using an open-butt end of 1-3/4" hose, a 25-ft length of rope, ... (Full Story & Photos)

We spend a fair amount of time in our seminars talking about how best to use apparatus coming to your water supply operation. Folks are generally most familiar with the mutual aid rigs that they commonly run with. It is that once-every-couple years, large-scale tanker shuttle operation where folks can encounter water haulers with which they are unfamiliar. We always say that "you get a pass" the ... (Full Story & Photos)

During the first week of December 2025, we completed another bridge mount dry fire hydrant installation for the Clarendon (Vermont) Volunteer Fire Department. Back in 2017, we installed one of our first systems in Vermont; that one was located on Walker Mountain Road in Clarendon. The 2025, installation involved a bridge privately owned by Casella Construction along Route 133. The unique challenge ... (Full Story & Photos)

Congratulations to the folks at the South Salem Fire District in Westchester County, New York on completing another dry fire hydrant installation. In January 2013, we completed a comprehensive water supply study/ assessment for the fire district. Since then, the fire district and fire department have worked hard to make improvements to their fire protection water supplies; they developed a plan and ... (Full Story & Photos)

We've been doing this work a long time...23 years under the GBW Associates, LLC moniker....a bunch of years prior to that with no moniker. July 1984 had us in Nikiski, Alaska with Larry Davis and Chief Billy Harris working on hauling big water for the folks on the Kenai Peninsula. Several, large industrial complexes populated the area and the need for alternative fire protection water supplies was ... (Full Story & Photos)

Many, many thanks to everyone who helped make 2025 a banner year for us here at GBW Associates, LLC. Our training seminars took us to places far and wide such as Athens, Alabama; Wheatland County, Alberta: Fairlee, Vermont: Floyd, Iowa: Watertown, South Dakota; and, Ottawa, Kansas just to name a few. Along the way we amassed just under 8,000 student hours of instruction and hauled around a million ... (Full Story & Photos)

From the Larry Davis, Jr. Collection, a photo from somewhere in New York State showing an external jet dump on a tanker. This is probably a circa-1980s photo and this technology was pretty innovative at that time. Work was underway on many fronts to figure out how to make tankers dump their water faster. The external jet dump was one of the innovations that could be applied to an existing tanker. ... (Full Story & Photos)

No rocket science here. A fair amount of our work involves troubleshooting dry fire hydrant and fire hydrant problems and developing recommendations/plans for repair or replacement. For dry fire hydrant suction heads, a common issue with the PVC/metal heads is failure of the sealant or gasket where the metal head is threaded into the PVC fitting. Some times this is production QC and sometimes it ... (Full Story & Photos)