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Fire departments' terrible track record advocating for bad urban policies
- mindcrime 3y agoDespite playing a broader role in emergency response, fire departments tend to see their advisory role as solely scoped to limiting fires and fire deaths. Preventing car crashes, for example, isn’t something fire departments have historically seen as their responsibility. And while firefighters are on the front lines of contending with the problems that come from homelessness—fires and EMS calls from encampments, for instance—addressing the root causes of homelessness has been well beyond their scope. That's a fair point. In my years in the fire service, We certainly never talked about reducing car crashes, or things of that nature, from any "it's related to what we do here" perspective. OTOH, I was with a very rural department, not a major urban department, so the concerns do differ a bit anyway. But still, I get what the author is saying here, and that resonates as mostly true. Regarding lane widths though: one reason the fire service may take the stance they do on that is simply the question of apparatus access. Fire apparatus have, for a variety of reasons, grown steadily larger over the decades. And as buildings get taller, ladder trucks need longer ladders, which leads to longer trucks which don't easily tolerate smaller streets, tighter turning radius, etc. So there's a certain inherent conflict here on that basis. Some departments actually run a small number of mini-pumpers (scaled down fire engines, basically) which are first due in areas with tight, congested, narrow streets. But this has its own issues regarding cost, staffing, etc.