What’s it like to steer the back end of a long fire truck? These guys know

On a gloomy morning in downtown Los Angeles, the crew at Los Angeles Fire Station 10 meandered about the firehouse, checked the equipment and swapped playful jabs at one another.

Then the bell rang out.

The loudspeaker blared out orders for a rescue: Someone was on top of a two-story building, possibly threatening to jump.

Firefighter Steve Schaller, 39, rushed into his yellow jumpsuit. He hopped into the front driver’s seat of Tiller Fire Truck 10. His captain jumped in next to him. A third firefighter joined them in the cab.

Sixty feet in the back, firefighter Robert Bobadilla climbed up the side of the truck and into a glass and metal cab the size of a small fridge, alone. He pulled his headset on as the engine in front roared to life.

As the truck took off, Bobadilla, 32, was tugged along, steering in conjunction with the firefighter up front driving, the engineer – his partner.

Bobadilla is a tillerman, one of the men and women you see sitting in the back of such elongated fire trucks – from L.A. and Torrance to Orange and San Bernardino counties and elsewhere.

He is much more than a public icon for excited children to wave to – tiller drivers play a unique role in steering what many in the field call a “rolling toolbox,” a fire truck stuff with tools that can still maneuver into more challenging spaces than an average fire truck.

“He drives it like a tractor trailer,” Bobadilla said of his teammate up front, Schaller, “so I really don’t have to tiller unless we’re in a tight spot or narrow street – I’m trying to avoid an object.”

The front and back of the tiller truck are one but separate, on independent axles. The tillerman’s steering wheel controls the rear tires.

Steering the rear is opposite from driving a typical vehicle: If the front engineer makes a right turn, the tillerman swings his steering wheel to the left.

“Some of the challenges of operating the back is you always have to stay vigilant,” said Jeff Lewison, a 29-year-old tillerman with the Torrance Fire Department. “You can’t zone out.”

Everything else – acceleration, brakes, turn signals, sirens and more – is controlled by the engineer up front.

Capt. Bobby Roset of the San Bernardino County Fire Department said he was “scared to death” when first sat in the tiller box nearly 20 years ago.

“It’s intimidating the first time you ever tiller, because you don’t have a brake pedal and you don’t have a gas pedal,” the 48-year-old said. “You are getting pulled around town. It’s not like driving a car, where you have control.”

The engineer and tillerman constantly talk through radio headsets. In case those headsets fail for some reason, there is a small horn in the tiller box – the tillerman can beep signals to the engineer, signaling whether to go, or to stop or to back up.

The pecking order on the tiller truck goes like this: firefighter, tillerman, engineer, captain.

To be a tillerman takes dozens of hours of specialized practice – and trust must be gained with the team on the truck.

“There have been accidents,” said Robert Frick, an engineer who drives the front of tiller trucks for the Orange County Fire Authority. “Documented accidents where the engineer in the front may have been driving a little too fast and not allowing the tillerman to compensate to turn around a tight turn,” the 52-year-old Frick said about tiller trucks in general. “That’s why it’s always slow, methodical, defensive and maintaining communication.”

Roset has held every one of the four positions on the tiller truck. These days, he works out of Fontana Station 71, as the captain riding up front on calls. But he also lends a hand training green tillermen.

“Being on the truck makes you think outside of the box, because calls aren’t textbook,” Roset said. “You take all of the knowledge from over the years and apply it to make it work.”

For example, if there’s a bad accident on the freeway, the tiller truck can block off traffic.

Roset has gently jackknifed the truck on purpose and straightened it out to park sideways, turning it into a barricade on the 215 Freeway when responding to difficult calls, such as for crashes so bad that firefighters might need to deploy the Jaws of Life.

“I look at this as 68 feet of bulletproof cones,” Roset said. “I’ll put that between us and people – if someone’s going to hit (something), they’re going to hit this – which is replaceable, versus taking us all out on the other side.”

Tools on the truck include chainsaws, ventilation fans and ladders of varying sizes.

“Honestly, I think it’s my love for kind of fixing things,” Schaller said of why he became a firefighter. “Once I found out that literally people call 911 for any problem – no matter how small or big – that is really what we do day in and day out.”

There is a gigantic cushion, too, tucked away – which is why the Los Angeles Fire Department’s tiller truck trundled recently to that call for the person who firefighters thought might jump from the building (First responders were able to get the person down without the cushion).

And then there’s the centerpiece, the 100-foot-or-so ladder that can reach the rooftops of buildings up to seven or eight stories high.

While in movies rescues from windows are a common use of the ladder, more often it’s deployed by firefighters to get onto rooftops and cut holes with chainsaws for ventilation during fires.

There’s also a hose nozzle strapped to the top of the ladder to douse fires with water from up above.

From way up above.

“It is still nerve-wracking – I wasn’t the biggest fan of heights at first, I’m not going to lie,” said Trevor Lima, 31, a tillerman for the Orange County Fire Authority, which covers much of the county. “It takes time trusting your equipment.”

Like an athlete, those good in the tiller box need poise.

“The biggest mistake you can make as a tillerman is overthinking and oversteering,” Lima said. “If you try to help (the front driver) too much, you’ll end up swerving into another lane.”

Before they hit the streets, there are hours of driving in empty parking lots and snaking between cones. There are serpentine courses set up, and other courses the engineer and tiller must navigate going backward.

“I thought I hit nothing,” Roset recalled of a practice session. “Because you’re back there and, look, I thought I had cleared them all. But 10 (of 100) cones ended up being down.”

Better than side-swiping cars later.

“We’re never going to take a guy out on the busy roads until we’re comfortable, and he’s comfortable,” said John Wass, an engineer with the Torrance Fire Department.

Even when a rookie tillerman becomes a calm vet, it can get hot back there in the tiller box. Unlike up front, there’s no air conditioning.

“You have two fans, but they don’t circulate air very well,” said Jaime Torres, a tillerman for the Orange County Fire Authority who is learning to become an engineer. “The guys in the nice, brand new cab, they have AC and it’s nice and chilly.

“When I’m in there and (Lima’s) in the back, I’ll be like, ‘Oh, it’s cold in here – I need to put my jacket on.’ When it’s 90 or 100 degrees outside, he’s sweating back there.”