At a press conference Friday morning, Austin Police Chief Brian Manley said the vehicles will be kept in storage as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and Ford continue to investigate the cause.
For now, officers will use Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptors already in use by other divisions of the agency, including the highway enforcement and tactics teams. Manley said the agency has the necessary vehicles to accommodate officers; however, the agency will switch from one officer per vehicle to two officers per vehicle.
Additional vehicles within the agency will be moved to patrol, but will need upfitting. The city's IT department and Make Ready shop are expected to upfit and deploy five patrol vehicles per week, with the aim of returning to single-officer patrol. The divisions that previously used these vehicles will have a motor pool that they can use as needed.
"All frontline police vehicles will be pursuit-rated and equipped with the necessary equipment to do their job," Manley said.
Austin PD first learned of the problem in February, and
installed carbon monoxide detectors
in March. Over the past five months, Manley said 73 vehicles have been pulled out of service based on alarms going off or confirmed reports of carbon monoxide present.
Earlier this week,
CBS News
reported that NHTSA is expanding its probe of 2011-2015 Ford Explorers and Police Interceptor Utility vehicles to include 2016 and 2017 models. Similar problems with carbon monoxide were found in police vehicles in Henderson, La.; Newport Beach, Calif.; and the Kansas Highway Patrol. Forty-one people have reported injuries, and although NHTSA emphasized that it does not have proof the injuries reported were caused by carbon monoxide, it did say levels of that gas may be elevated during certain driving scenarios.
Park City, Kan., also dealt with traces of carbon monoxide, but
KSN
reported that city officials worked with Ford and traced the source to its upfitted lights, where exhaust entered the vehicle through unsealed holes.
Despite these cases, many agencies have reported that their vehicles are fine.
The City of San Diego, Calif., tested 295 of its PIUs and found no traces of carbon monoxide.
10News
contacted six other agencies near San Diego, including Border Patrol, and none found problems with carbon monoxide.
According to
WNYT
, several New York agencies have reported no issues with their vehicles, including the Albany County Sheriff's Office, Troy Police, Albany Police, and the Rensselaer County Sheriff's Office.
The Denver Police Department, Arapahoe County Sheriff's Office, and several other agencies in Colorado told
CBS4
they were not experiencing any problems, though the City of Denver has ordered carbon monoxide detectors as a precaution.
UPDATE: As of Monday afternoon, APD is continuing to remove its Explorer and PIUs out of service, said David Green, spokesperson for the city. All frontline vehicles have been removed from service, and the vast majority of support staff vehicles have also been removed.
This article originally appeared on
www.government-fleet.com
.