Antique fire engine located

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (WTNH) -- An antique fire engine was lost for years. It was located and as of Thursday it's back where it started so long ago.

And it's all just in time for the New Haven Fire Department's 150th anniversary.

It looks like a large toy, especially to the school kids, but the gasoline pumper built in 1909 is an important piece of New Haven firefighting history. And it's finally home, on display at City Hall.

"So it's good to have it home," said Mayor John DeStefano.

If it could talk, the pumper would brag how back then horses would pull it through streets, its hoses attaching to cisterns, its gas engine pumping out the water.

It was likely on scene for the 1910 jail fire postcards capturing the scene that day where six firefighters were killed.

"We assume that this fire engine, which was stationed only four blocks away fought that fire from the beginning," said William Celentano, former fire commissioner, "so that is probably the one story if it could talk, the story it would tell."

What made the engine revolutionary at the time is that once it arrived at the fire scene they could get water onto the flames faster.

As New Haven's Fire Department celebrates 150 years, looking at Engine 9 you realize how far firefighting has come. Better equipment, but in 2012 a more complicated job, not just putting out fires.

"To be quite honest what we do now is we respond to all types of hazards," said Chief Michael Grant, New Haven Fire Dept., "you name the hazard we go to it, whether it's man-made natural type of disaster."

Fully restored, and the job carried a risk then and now.