Contending with one of the most vertical cityscapes in all of North America, firefighters in Toronto face some harrowing challenges trying to fend off fires in the city's taller buildings.

But have no fear, as the Toronto Fire Services (TFS) High Rise Unit recently welcomed its newest addition, a beast of an aerial rescue platform that can extend as high as a 20-storey residential building.

This new ten-wheeled titan can be seen rolling along Front Street East in the embedded tweet below, just outside its home base at Toronto Fire Station 333.

Oh lord…. The newest addition is in town for Toronto Fire 70 metre Bronto Skylift (230ft)#toronto pic.twitter.com/BwhvGyWE1b

— Kyle.Taylor (@livingbyyyz) December 23, 2021

The Bronto Skylift Model F70RPX is an enormous telescopic crane, mounted on conventional cab truck chassis, that can extend a staggering 70 metres to assist fire crews performing dangerous rescue and firefighting operations.

If you want to know how tall 70 metres is, it's just a few metres shy of Toronto City Hall's height, and about ten metres longer than the end-to-end length of an NHL rink.

Towering infernos have been a growing problem in cities around the world, with high profile fires like the Grenfell Tower fire in London, England and the Notre Dame fire in Paris, France pushing fire departments to explore options for combating fires and rescuing people trapped in tall buildings.

Representatives of TFS got their first look at the 70-metre tall behemoth in 2019 in New York City, where the Fire Department of the City of New York showed off the technology with demonstrations at the famous Flat Iron Building and St. Paul's Cathedral.

TFS was sold on the equipment, and the following year, an F70RPX was purchased by the city for just over $3.2 million, along with a smaller model with a 41-metre reach for an additional $2.7 million.

And now that it's arrived and preparing to enter service in January, high-rise dwellers can all sleep a little bit easier knowing that this gigantic crane is around.