Young Pickering boy built his own truck and answers calls for minor injuries
Oct 09, 2008 - 04:30 AM
By Kristen Calis
PICKERING -- If a kid on Sammy Xerri's street falls off their bike, or a small grass fire breaks out on a neighbour's lawn, they know who to call.
"I go to small neighbourhood calls," said the 11-year-old Holy Redeemer student as he excitedly demonstrated the ins and outs of his working fire truck.
The Grade 6 student recently completed his second fire truck, designed on a 3-D computer program and subsequently built in the garage with his dad. Sammy's fascination began in the third grade when he met his friend's father, a firefighter, and he soon built his first fire truck on a Fisher-Price wagon.
"It was just something he liked to do and he would work in the garage for hours on end," his mother Catherine Xerri said, adding a fire manual is his bedtime reading.
Sammy has a form of autism called Aspergers, which Ms. Xerri explained gives him the tendency to zero in on one thing, "and this is his thing."
While most 11-year-olds like to shop for their favourite toys or video games, her son chooses to look for ways to upgrade his fire truck.
"Most kids like to go to Toys "R" Us," Ms. Xerri said. "Sammy's favourite place is Home Depot."
He's well-known by Pickering Fire Services, which supplied stickers for his truck. Before the firefighters realized Sammy's talents, he used to come to events and tell them all about his trucks. Fire inspector Steve Fowlds told him he didn't believe him and asked him to bring it in. Since then, Sammy's become pretty famous around the department.
"He comes to all our open houses," Mr. Fowlds said.
The fire truck is basically a regular fire truck, just smaller. It's fire-truck red, has four working hoses with different nozzles, a working 10-gallon water tank with numerous controls, a first-aid kit, batteries, a garbage can, flashlights, a licence plate that reads "SAM," headlights, several doors, official fire department decals and wheel axles that he had to order in all the way from Wisconsin. He even has a mini-computer where he stores all of his response documentation.
"I have a really loud siren," he said, adding he uses it when he's turning corners on his street or when kids need to get out of the way when he responds to a call.
But, his interest doesn't stop at building the truck: Sammy attended a junior firefighters' camp in the summer, where he won an award for exceptional knowledge of fire fighting and fire safety.
"I want to be a firefighter when I grow up," he said. "I like the trucks but I would also like to go to the calls."
And he's certainly getting practise lugging around his fire truck.
"I'm not bragging about my strength or anything, but it's pretty hard to pull, even I admit it," he said, adding it weighs about 120 pounds when the water tank is empty and 150 pounds when it's full.
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