PHELAN — When the San Gabriel Canyon started to burn in 1981, fire crews wanted nothing to do with Keril Keiser water tanks.
The Phelan veteran and entrepreneur made tanks for construction companies to keep their sites hosed down, but Keiser wondered if his inventions had another purpose.

“I kept thinking to myself, I can’t figure out why they don’t use this stuff for firefighting,” he said.

So, with the canyon burning around his Irwindale factory, Keiser offered the use of one of his construction tanks to fire crews.
They first turned him down, he said, until the fire caved in the roof covering their ground reservoir and clogged its water pumps. He got a desperate call at 2 a.m., asking for water.

Keiser drove his truck as close to the site as he could get. Unfortunately, his truck didn’t have a way to get the water into fire engines, so he sprayed the fires as best he could. Within hours, they had the fire under control and the foundation for Aqua Express was laid.

The inventor went home and began plotting ways to get more water to fire sites. He eventually overhauled an old Peterbilt logging truck, outfitted it with a tank that could carry roughly seven times the amount of water a normal fire engine can haul and pitched his idea to stations across Southern California and into Nevada.

Finally he found a taker, the San Bernardino County Fire Department. He sold the package for $50,000 — $15,000 less than what he wanted.

“The pioneers never get rich,” he said. “It’s the ones who come after who make the money,” which is just fine with him.

Keiser, 77, is now the founder, inventor, marketer and engineer for Aqua Express. He’s patented designs for mobile, elevated water reservoirs and helicopter dip tanks, which are used to get water to remote wildland fire sites as quickly and easily as possible.

Though he hasn’t helped fight any fires yet this season, with a happily slow season in Southern California so far, Keiser’s reservoirs have helped put out a number of fires, including during the dangerous 2003 season in Arrowhead, Big Bear and Lytle Creek.

Inventor’s first truck finds a home in Newberry Springs
By Abby Sewell, Staff Writer

NEWBERRY SPRINGS • The first water tender built by inventor Keril Keiser has found a home in Newberry Springs.

The Newberry Springs Fire Department received the truck, built in the early 1980s, in 2006, after the San Bernardino County Fire Department listed it as surplus, said Newberry’s Assistant Fire Chief Steve Miller. With a capacity of 4,000 gallons, two or three times larger than that of most water tenders, Miller said the truck has made “a tremendous difference” for the small department.

Having a large-capacity tank enables one driver to move more water in a shorter period of time, maximizing the department’s resources, Miller said.

State and federal regulations on commercial drivers’ licenses make it difficult for small volunteer departments like Newberry Springs to find drivers for their heavy trucks, meaning that each licensed commercial driver must move as much water as possible on each trip.

How it works

Keiser’s mobile reservoir is a 7,500-gallon tank on wheels. It can be pulled behind a truck, unhitched and — with the touch of a button — elevated two stories in the air, with only a 12-volt battery.

Once elevated, the tank can be used to fill standard fire engines in less than two minutes by simply releasing the valve.

Keiser can drive the tank as close as possible to a fire site and set it up for use. He then drives his 3,200-gallon water tender truck back and forth from the nearest water source, refilling the giant tank as needed. This saves fire departments money on fuel and, more importantly, priceless time to stay close to the action.

More recently, he designed a 6,500-gallon mobile “heli-troff” so that both snorkel and pump-style firefighting helicopters can refill their tanks closer to fire sites. He spent months on the design, creating a half-cylinder dip tank on wheels.

Both sets of equipment have operated under a contract with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection since 2005.