Everything related to fires got better: more and better smoke and CO detectors, interior sprinklers, regulations around flammable clothes, bedding and mattresses, reduced smoking rates, increased awareness, faster response times, closure of firetrap rooming houses (fwiw: closing rooming houses contributes to the homelessness problem), better apartment inspections ...
We don't really need multiple exits in case of fire because fires are occurring less often and people are getting plenty of warning.
We're facing the issue in Ontario where firefighters are bored out of their minds and are being used as first responders for anything and everything. They show up to random fender benders.
They are also often out there narcaning people when paramedics are not available (which I am sure they are not super pumped about).
Honestly I am not really upset about that. Train them to support the community in other ways while they hang out waiting for a fire. People are always raging that police cant handle mental health incidents, train them for that (heh I am sure firefighters would not be pumped about that but you get the idea).
I’m only upset that we have an over abundance of fire fighters now and are looking for ways to keep them busy. Retraining as a combination of EMT and Fire for instance.
I want an overabundance of firefighters. On average my town needs 0. However a couple times a year there is a fire and then we need 30 for a couple hours. We solve this by hiring 30 full time fire fighters so that 10 are always on duty, and when there is a fire we call the on duty fire fighters from the other nearby towns to help.
(The above numbers are only rough estimates, close enough for discussion, but not even close to right)
Yet people still die in apartment building fires, usually because they panic when there is a fire in another apartment, leave their apartment, and suffocate to the smoke. And then there are cases where the regulation has failed / not been followed, and the whole building burns down despite best efforts from firefighters.
I've seen all these things happen, even though I live in EU country with strict regulations. I sure sleep better knowing that my apartment has entrance directly to outdoor corridor, and a ladder I can climb down from my balcony if the corridor is somehow blocked. I would never move into a modern apartment building where only escape is through indoor corridors.
>We don't really need multiple exits in case of fire because fires are occurring less often and people are getting plenty of warning.
I'm not a fire expert but I don't think that logic holds. The point is redundancy. If one exit gets blocked, you have another one you can use. Hospitals don't stop carrying backup power supply for life-saving equipment just because "the power grid downtime has improved."
Redundancy matters when it protects from plausible issues.
> Hospitals don't stop carrying backup power supply for life-saving equipment just because "the power grid downtime has improved."
When power goes down, there is an immediate harm to patients. The grid downtime would need to be really implausible. Also, batteries would probably be okay now.
When fire happens - which is rarer now - it also rarer blocks the exit in a way that causes harm now.
Good example is ETOPS - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS - some time ago, we required flights over ocean to have three or four engines. Now, reliability improved a lot, and the engines got good enough that single-engine operation is not so catastrophic as before.
Hospitals have all critical equipment on battery backup. The non-critical but important stuff can turn off for a minute while the backup generator starts.
Power outages tend to correlate strongly with situations where the hospital is most needed - bad weather injures a lot of people and takes the power out
Safety advocates (I.e. fire experts) are on board with changing the Ontario building code to no longer require multiple stair wells in new structures below a certain number of floors because of the lowered risk factors. Just need policies to catch up.
Not if the central stairwell is designed as, effectively, a bunker in the middle of the building. Build it out of concrete, with door closures and ample sprinklers, and the stairwell will never be the source of a fire mandating total evacuation. Today we even have "areas of refuge", normally at landings, where mobility-impaired people may wait for rescue rather than attempt stairs.
External fire escapes are the best they could do 150 years ago with existing buildings that were a fire trap and clearly better than nothing. However even then they knew they were not ideal.
Them being bored is generally a good thing because it means the area is fairly safe, but that will tank their motivation I suppose.
I did call them once though - a post box was smoking. Possibly a device with a battery, or else someone putting fireworks or a cigarrete butt in them, who knows. But it gave the firemen something to do I suppose.
I've had friends that have been fire fighters and I think the burnout is real. They're not dealing with structure fires much anymore which is what a lot of their training deals with. Rather they do a lot of social work in the area taking care of the unhoused, disinfranchised, mentally disabled, etc... all while having this unique training.
Is that because the firefighters are bored or because they want to show the public that they're doing something valuable before the public realizes that we don't need so many of them?
Firefighters do a lot more than you probably realize. For instance, who is carrying grandma with her broken hip down the rickety stairs from her top floor bathroom? It's probably not just the two-person ambulance crew. You going to get grandpa to help?
These are the kinds of routine jobs that fire crews handle everyday that are invaluable to society.
Don't forget all of those cats stuck in tree that get rescued by local FD. Recent stories of pets in storm drains being rescued as well. But as someone else already posted, most are responding to auto accidents. Nothing as useful for redirecting traffic and shielding first responders than a giant firetruck blocking the lanes.
I realize it which is why their strategy is a good one. Does it make sense for the people who are able to do that job also all be able to put out fires?
I think someone that can carry grandma down the stairs and also occasionally put out a catastrophic fire is a pretty reasonable and efficient use of taxpayer money. The alternative would be what, having two different people to do those things?
It depends. In Ontario (or at least Toronto where I live), the fire department and ambulance services are separate. The paramedics are chronically underfunded and the result is that the fire department is constantly running up milage on multiple expensive and massive fire trucks for routine calls that should just have been a paramedic. This also compounds traffic issues when they park at their destination.
It makes sense for them to automatically show up for some situations (eg car accidents), but there should be a properly funded triage system.
Same goes for the police, which are often called for situations where there should be some other social workers available (again, there are exceptions where police should also be present in those situations).
Where I live, the fire department has rescue trucks which sometimes can be large (like a ladder-less fire truck) but can also be as small as a heavy duty work truck. Some departments have enough money to have all kinds of various vehicles for special situations while other departments have just enough to own one vehicle to cover as many needs as possible. It would make more sense to buy something smaller but can they justify the cost to the county or city? And in cities, they still need the big ladder truck and likely need to host an ambulance in the station and probably a fire chief vehicle too. The money is limited as well as the space. I'm sure cities are already rethinking what they actually need now versus 50 years ago. I've already seen paramedic vehicles that are not ambulances, they look like a work van or truck, just enough for two paramedics and enough supplies to treat someone that doesn't need to immediately go to the hospital or to serve as an auxiliary during a mass casualty event. The truck is way cheaper than an ambulance.
>It depends. In Ontario (or at least Toronto where I live), the fire department and ambulance services are separate. The paramedics are chronically underfunded
That isn't cost effective. They need the large trucks just in case - even though realistically they are never used. A large truck isn't that much more expensive to drive than a small one, and in any case if the large truck isn't used for more than a couple days you need to take it for a drive - ensure all the operators know how to drive it and if something broke (sitting is harmful to moving parts - wear is worse, but sitting is harmful) you want to find out and fix it right away.
Which is to say the small cheaper car only makes sense after you have enough large ones and conclude you still need more cars.
Powerlifting doesn't teach you the technique and spotting required to walk backwards down a staircase while holding a stretcher above your head so that grandma, who is in extreme pain, doesn't slide off and tumble to the bottom.
Maybe? Firefighting is extremely physically demanding, which is why you'll often see firehouses with built in gym, and rarely see a fat fire fighter. So that physical capability can be used in other circumstances.
Also, firefighters need to know how to dismantle a house quickly to support their operations. So if the door needs to come off the hinges to get grandma down the stairs, firefighters will be prepared for that and have it done in 30 seconds
The problem is that the need is spiky. You don't need many of them until an old apartment building or factory catches fire because of cladding made in the 70s.
They are like seat belts, or audit logs. You don't need so many of them, right up until you do.
Ahh yes, the old "why do we have all these inefficient empty hospital beds???" problem.
On a fundamental level, efficiency and resilience are always a trade-off. A perfectly efficient system also tends to be perfectly brittle! In practice everything needs some buffer.
We shouldn't aim for "as close to 100% efficiency on <metric> as possible," but rather "lowest risk-adjusted expected cost, including mishaps." The latter correctly prices rare events.
>> We're facing the issue in Ontario where firefighters are bored out of their minds and are being used as first responders for anything and everything. They show up to random fender benders.
> Is that because the firefighters are bored or because they want to show the public that they're doing something valuable before the public realizes that we don't need so many of them?
If they need to do that, it's not because of the public. It's probably because they got a "challenge" from some clever idiot with a business or economics degree.
Also, people typically want something valuable to do, so they go find it. That's not something the proponents of our coming AI utopia seem to understand.
I think that's being a bit too much here. I can't speak for Ontario fire departments, but in the US, major cities have specialized trucks with crews trained for things specific to auto accidents. Hazmat training to deal with leaking fuel/oil/fluids to stay safe and clean up.
Keeping firefighters from being bored is why you see them playing pickleball or other sporty things around the firehouse. If your firefighters are that bored, you should look at having the chief replaced with someone better trained. Especially for the city the size of Ontario.
You might not need (say) 100 firefighters for the day to day work in a medium city any more... but you absolutely need 100 firefighters when the large chemical plant goes up in a blaze.
It's hard enough in Germany to balance that, but we at least can draw on the advantage of Germany being decently settled which means we can have support crews come in from neighboring cities. But in the US where it might be the case that the nearest city with enough staff is hours of driving away? By the time you get enough staff on site, the entire plant is gone.
That is not how the US looks/works. The large chemical plant is in a large city (or suburb) where they can call plenty of other nearby cities for help.
Most of the land in the US doesn't have enough population to support a large chemical plant. The plant needs not only the people who work in the plant. It also needs schools, grocery stores, libraries, doctors... And that many people also really want things like sports teams. A small chemical plant can locate in a rural areas, but not a large one.
In my town every firefighter is also an EMT and every fire truck has an AED and ventilation bag. And the local firehouse is invariably closer to basically everything than the ALS ambulance is.
So over the last several decades, "firefighter" has really just become emergency responder, where "emergency" can be a lot of things that happen in society pretty often.
Firefighting is a a task with a pretty intrinsically bursty demand. You're employing them for the very peak of that demand and otherwise you want them working on relatively low priority things that can be dropped in an emergency.
> Or perhaps we should dial back on how many firefighters we keep employed at all times.
When there is a fire you still need enough at location in time.
The fact that there are enough in short distance with good equipment is one of the things which causes the low number of big fires: once the mandatory detector goes of for a little fire they are on site before it becomes big.
In the UK, we have quite a few 'on call' firefighters (about a third of the total) who are fully trained and are paid but are not full time. They typically work another job but are available during certain hours if required. I'm not sure if similar systems exist elsewhere.
A huge portion of the US is covered by purely volunteer fire departments. Communities pay for equipment and training and that is it. Response times are slow but it is really the only viable option in rural areas.
Not always slow. I had a kitchen fire at 4am from a microwave spontaneously combusting. Had the local deputy fire chief and local fire truck there within 15 minutes plus trucks from two other local towns.
At the federal level, FEMA and USDA offer extensive grants and low interest loans to fund fire districts in rural communities with a small tax base. I think basically every state offers similar funding assistance on top of that.
Looks like 80% of firefighters (or rescue personnel according to modern naming) in Finland are members of volunteer fire brigades or so-called contract fire brigades and they respond to nearly half of the total emergencies but over 90% of emergencies outside densely populated areas.
> We're facing the issue in Ontario where firefighters are bored out of their minds and are being used as first responders for anything and everything. They show up to random fender benders.
Aren't (many?) firefighters certified as paramedics?
In USA, most are not paramedics (ALS). Those are typically only advanced-care ambulances (blood, drugs, intubation, EKG/manual defib, emergency operations like trach tubes). But a lot of firefighters are EMTs (BLS). Oxygen, vent bags, apirin, Epipen, CPR, automated defib (AED).
We had this in NZ *years* ago at this point. Mate was a fire fighter for a few years (until his knees gave up, it's a brutal job) and he went to almost no actual fires. It was everything else.
> We don't really need multiple exits in case of fire
Tell that to the residents of Grenfell Tower.
Fire escapes are an anachronism for buildings with a smaller footprint that aren't terribly high. Brownstones and smaller (older) apartment buildings in NYC are classic examples. Some of those buildings were also timber framed so having an external and secondary exit was imperative, particularly after major 19th century fire disasters.
What really happened is we started building concrete and steel core buildings that were particularly high so external fire escapes weren't really practical or necessary because the of the building height and the fact that modern buildings typically nearly always have multiple sets of stairs with fire doors, which saved a bunch of lives in one of the WTC towers on 9/11 but not the other (where all 4 staircases were breached).
Having a single point of egress is an incredibly bad idea as evidenced by Grenfell Tower.
> We're facing the issue in Ontario where firefighters are bored out of their minds and are being used as first responders for anything and everything.
With climate change we can repurpose them as waterfighters when sea level rise, floods and berm breaches become an acute problem.
Firefighting in a large city versus a small town I assume are different, but the firefighters I know would never describe themselves as bored. They get paid to spend the majority of their time hanging out with friends, barbecuing, working on their cars, enjoying life, etc for the occasional hugely important and often terrifying life saving firefighting work.
They deploy more often than when I was a kid for EMT type work in place of or as first responder for ambulances. But, none of them would ever describe their day to day as boring.
I went to a Victorian era school in London and it had one of those cast iron fire escapes going from the ground up to the 2nd floor (3rd floor to the Americans) and it was a good deal of fun to play on!
In my last year of school, it was cut off completely and not replaced. Hmm, weird. Apparently it was unsafe and someone decided it wasn't needed because there were two other stairwells.
Fast-forwards to after my graduation and returning to work at the school as a teacher. The top floor is out of bounds to everyone. Why? The fire escape is missing :-)
During a real fire at my school, also in the UK, a cast iron fire escape partially collapsed. I don't remember any mention of injuries, and it was replaced with a new, steel staircase within a few weeks.
Making the main staircase more fire-resistant is great but I'm not fully convinced by the arguments for removing external ones instead of having both.
If the main stairs do turn out to be impassable for some reason despite the new measures, I'd much rather have the option to risk taking an external fire escape even if it might be rusty or blocked by clutter.
Every large building in the last 100 years has been built with multiple integral fire-safe paths of egress for the very reason that a path should be available if one is blocked. The design of buildings is very much conditioned on tables in the fire code about how many paths of egress, how large they must be, and how long they can be based on how many people need to be evacuated. (Not to mention how many hours of fire each door and partition must be designed to resist.) It's kind of a PITA. And it works very well.
External fire escapes are merely the retrofit allowed to old single-stairway buildings to get them to be vaguely as safe as a modern building.
A lot of buildings now require at least two stairwells for buildings over three stories. There's talk in Massachusetts of easing that requirement the requirement to four or six stories, which is more common worldwide and could help build more affordable housing.
Note: This requirement is a contributor to US apartments being ugly. Depressing line corridors, and only one side of windows unless you're in the corner. Other countries don't have the double stairway requirement, and are prettier as a result.
What would burn in those manhattan buildings? Are the internal walls wood?
I don't know what would burn in the building I live in now. It's all cement construction. The internal walls are brick with gypsum over. The window coverings and furniture is flame resistant. I suppose I'd be screwed if my downstairs neighbor had a bunch of flammable stuff though. Also we have an underground parking lot full of cars... maybe I should invest in a ladder.
Not usually for anything over a few stories. Most of those taller buildings are a combination of masonry and steel. Steel started being used in the 1880s/1890s.
A fire extinguisher will not get you out. A fire extinguisher it to clear a path so you can get to the path outside. Many people get this wrong - they put the fire extinguisher by the door, but if you are at the door you should be going outside not trying to fight the fire. (most fires are small enough that you can put them out with a fire extinguisher so this seems to work - but that is not the primary purpose)
What you need is a path out when there is a large fire. Both exits and fire extinguishers are part of that. Everything else is a nice to have (sometimes very nice), but you still have to prepare for when everything else fails.
In my 4th floor apartment in Tokyo there was a box containing what seemed to be basically an abseiling harness. Instructions in Japanese but seemed like if shit hits the fan you smash the window, clip it to the building and get yourself down to street level asap.
Our AirBnB in Tokyo last year had a box mounted on the balcony which (according to the instructions on the outside) held some crane-like thing with a harness to let you swing out over the balcony and rappel down in the case of emergency.
My parents had something very similar to this in their apartment in the midwestern US in the 80s. I recall it as being an aluminum mount with a chain ladder.
>What would burn in those manhattan buildings? Are the internal walls wood?
Me? I'd certainly prefer that didn't happen.
Which is why I'm glad I have a fire escape. Should there be a fire that either blocks access to the main stairwell and/or my front door, there's an additional egress point at the other end of my apartment.
I'd much prefer that there wasn't a fire at all, but I'd much rather have multiple egress points for me and my animals than having to sit and wait to die of smoke inhalation if a serious fire were to rip through my (more than a century old) apartment building.
Your flame resistant furniture will pyrolize just fine once the apartment gets hot enough. Just takes one idiot keeping their budget lithium bike inside to ignite the whole mess--ask me how I know.
The construction is there to isolate suites and delay the spread, but don't kid yourself that a given suite doesn't contain enough fuel to have a major fire, given the right ignition source and tinder.
In Japan, the main stairs of the building is designed like fire escapes. It is unenclosed and mostly on the side of the building. When I first saw them I thought it was silly to have the stairs open to the environment during rain and snow. I finally realized they have double purpose.
In S. Korea almost all apartment buildings have their own escape lapel rope attached to the window and all have a fire proof blanket in the cabinet near the exit door.
If one can have an entire 20min piece about how bad fire escapes are and how bad they were from the start it kind of begs the question as to why they were allowed on new construction to begin with. Surely somebody was in favor of them?
Perhaps a comparison to the current breaker requirements in the electrical code and other "industry excess" shall we say, in the IBC is in order.
But Grady isn't gonna make that comparison because when a man's salary depends on not understanding something he won't understand it.
Building code is a very, very, very dirty sausage factory. It's a disservice to everybody to just hand wave that all away at a dozen points like is done here.
> The story of their decline is a fascinating case study in how building codes actually work. I’m Grady and this is Practical Engineering.
... who else immediately heard the signature melody of his intro after reading these words?! I certainly did.
> When New York City updated their building codes in 1968, exterior exits were officially prohibited for new construction.
Fascinatingly in Germany it is just the other way around. If you have an old building that was built before fire codes mandated two independent exits for every residential room, and the window cannot be reached by a fire ladder, you are mandated to retrofit an escape ladder if you do a renovation of the building.
> Fascinatingly in Germany it is just the other way around.
You're contrasting rules for new construction with rules for existing buildings during renovation.
It's difficult and often impractical to retrofit a protected stairway into an existing building, but it's not a major hardship to include in new construction (although requirements can substantially change layouts)
Everything related to fires got better: more and better smoke and CO detectors, interior sprinklers, regulations around flammable clothes, bedding and mattresses, reduced smoking rates, increased awareness, faster response times, closure of firetrap rooming houses (fwiw: closing rooming houses contributes to the homelessness problem), better apartment inspections ...
We don't really need multiple exits in case of fire because fires are occurring less often and people are getting plenty of warning.
We're facing the issue in Ontario where firefighters are bored out of their minds and are being used as first responders for anything and everything. They show up to random fender benders.
They are also often out there narcaning people when paramedics are not available (which I am sure they are not super pumped about).
Honestly I am not really upset about that. Train them to support the community in other ways while they hang out waiting for a fire. People are always raging that police cant handle mental health incidents, train them for that (heh I am sure firefighters would not be pumped about that but you get the idea).
I’m only upset that we have an over abundance of fire fighters now and are looking for ways to keep them busy. Retraining as a combination of EMT and Fire for instance.
I want an overabundance of firefighters. On average my town needs 0. However a couple times a year there is a fire and then we need 30 for a couple hours. We solve this by hiring 30 full time fire fighters so that 10 are always on duty, and when there is a fire we call the on duty fire fighters from the other nearby towns to help.
(The above numbers are only rough estimates, close enough for discussion, but not even close to right)
Yet people still die in apartment building fires, usually because they panic when there is a fire in another apartment, leave their apartment, and suffocate to the smoke. And then there are cases where the regulation has failed / not been followed, and the whole building burns down despite best efforts from firefighters.
I've seen all these things happen, even though I live in EU country with strict regulations. I sure sleep better knowing that my apartment has entrance directly to outdoor corridor, and a ladder I can climb down from my balcony if the corridor is somehow blocked. I would never move into a modern apartment building where only escape is through indoor corridors.
>We don't really need multiple exits in case of fire because fires are occurring less often and people are getting plenty of warning.
I'm not a fire expert but I don't think that logic holds. The point is redundancy. If one exit gets blocked, you have another one you can use. Hospitals don't stop carrying backup power supply for life-saving equipment just because "the power grid downtime has improved."
Redundancy matters when it protects from plausible issues.
> Hospitals don't stop carrying backup power supply for life-saving equipment just because "the power grid downtime has improved."
When power goes down, there is an immediate harm to patients. The grid downtime would need to be really implausible. Also, batteries would probably be okay now.
When fire happens - which is rarer now - it also rarer blocks the exit in a way that causes harm now.
Good example is ETOPS - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS - some time ago, we required flights over ocean to have three or four engines. Now, reliability improved a lot, and the engines got good enough that single-engine operation is not so catastrophic as before.
Hospitals have all critical equipment on battery backup. The non-critical but important stuff can turn off for a minute while the backup generator starts.
Power outages tend to correlate strongly with situations where the hospital is most needed - bad weather injures a lot of people and takes the power out
Safety advocates (I.e. fire experts) are on board with changing the Ontario building code to no longer require multiple stair wells in new structures below a certain number of floors because of the lowered risk factors. Just need policies to catch up.
Not if the central stairwell is designed as, effectively, a bunker in the middle of the building. Build it out of concrete, with door closures and ample sprinklers, and the stairwell will never be the source of a fire mandating total evacuation. Today we even have "areas of refuge", normally at landings, where mobility-impaired people may wait for rescue rather than attempt stairs.
> We don't really need multiple exits in case of fire because fires are occurring less often and people are getting plenty of warning.
Based on the video, external fire exits were a bad idea from the start and were recommended against 150 years ago, but inertia is hard to overcome.
(unless I Completely misunderstood)
And the problem with interior fire escape stairs was solved by encasing them in concrete and adding self-closing doors to prevent updrafts.
Which works great for new buildings. It not feasible to change a building that already exists.
External fire escapes are the best they could do 150 years ago with existing buildings that were a fire trap and clearly better than nothing. However even then they knew they were not ideal.
Them being bored is generally a good thing because it means the area is fairly safe, but that will tank their motivation I suppose.
I did call them once though - a post box was smoking. Possibly a device with a battery, or else someone putting fireworks or a cigarrete butt in them, who knows. But it gave the firemen something to do I suppose.
I've had friends that have been fire fighters and I think the burnout is real. They're not dealing with structure fires much anymore which is what a lot of their training deals with. Rather they do a lot of social work in the area taking care of the unhoused, disinfranchised, mentally disabled, etc... all while having this unique training.
Is that because the firefighters are bored or because they want to show the public that they're doing something valuable before the public realizes that we don't need so many of them?
Firefighters do a lot more than you probably realize. For instance, who is carrying grandma with her broken hip down the rickety stairs from her top floor bathroom? It's probably not just the two-person ambulance crew. You going to get grandpa to help?
These are the kinds of routine jobs that fire crews handle everyday that are invaluable to society.
Don't forget all of those cats stuck in tree that get rescued by local FD. Recent stories of pets in storm drains being rescued as well. But as someone else already posted, most are responding to auto accidents. Nothing as useful for redirecting traffic and shielding first responders than a giant firetruck blocking the lanes.
I realize it which is why their strategy is a good one. Does it make sense for the people who are able to do that job also all be able to put out fires?
I think someone that can carry grandma down the stairs and also occasionally put out a catastrophic fire is a pretty reasonable and efficient use of taxpayer money. The alternative would be what, having two different people to do those things?
It depends. In Ontario (or at least Toronto where I live), the fire department and ambulance services are separate. The paramedics are chronically underfunded and the result is that the fire department is constantly running up milage on multiple expensive and massive fire trucks for routine calls that should just have been a paramedic. This also compounds traffic issues when they park at their destination.
It makes sense for them to automatically show up for some situations (eg car accidents), but there should be a properly funded triage system.
Same goes for the police, which are often called for situations where there should be some other social workers available (again, there are exceptions where police should also be present in those situations).
Where I live, the fire department has rescue trucks which sometimes can be large (like a ladder-less fire truck) but can also be as small as a heavy duty work truck. Some departments have enough money to have all kinds of various vehicles for special situations while other departments have just enough to own one vehicle to cover as many needs as possible. It would make more sense to buy something smaller but can they justify the cost to the county or city? And in cities, they still need the big ladder truck and likely need to host an ambulance in the station and probably a fire chief vehicle too. The money is limited as well as the space. I'm sure cities are already rethinking what they actually need now versus 50 years ago. I've already seen paramedic vehicles that are not ambulances, they look like a work van or truck, just enough for two paramedics and enough supplies to treat someone that doesn't need to immediately go to the hospital or to serve as an auxiliary during a mass casualty event. The truck is way cheaper than an ambulance.
>It depends. In Ontario (or at least Toronto where I live), the fire department and ambulance services are separate. The paramedics are chronically underfunded
That's how it is in NYC[0] too...
[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/nyc-council-and-fdny-po...
The fire department should get a cheaper car for these calls then.
That isn't cost effective. They need the large trucks just in case - even though realistically they are never used. A large truck isn't that much more expensive to drive than a small one, and in any case if the large truck isn't used for more than a couple days you need to take it for a drive - ensure all the operators know how to drive it and if something broke (sitting is harmful to moving parts - wear is worse, but sitting is harmful) you want to find out and fix it right away.
Which is to say the small cheaper car only makes sense after you have enough large ones and conclude you still need more cars.
Well, yes, the alternative would be the necessary number of people to do the first thing and the necessary number of people to do the second thing.
If the two needs are distributed such that it works well to have one group of full-time workers able to do both, then I reckon that’s fine.
yes. they are edge cases but the training that comes with it translates fairly well to other tasks.
carrying grandma out of a burning building and carrying her downstairs after a fall are the same skill sets
So is powerlifting and ...?
Powerlifting doesn't teach you the technique and spotting required to walk backwards down a staircase while holding a stretcher above your head so that grandma, who is in extreme pain, doesn't slide off and tumble to the bottom.
Maybe? Firefighting is extremely physically demanding, which is why you'll often see firehouses with built in gym, and rarely see a fat fire fighter. So that physical capability can be used in other circumstances.
Also, firefighters need to know how to dismantle a house quickly to support their operations. So if the door needs to come off the hinges to get grandma down the stairs, firefighters will be prepared for that and have it done in 30 seconds
Yup, had this exact scenario across the street last week.
The problem is that the need is spiky. You don't need many of them until an old apartment building or factory catches fire because of cladding made in the 70s.
They are like seat belts, or audit logs. You don't need so many of them, right up until you do.
Ahh yes, the old "why do we have all these inefficient empty hospital beds???" problem.
On a fundamental level, efficiency and resilience are always a trade-off. A perfectly efficient system also tends to be perfectly brittle! In practice everything needs some buffer.
We shouldn't aim for "as close to 100% efficiency on <metric> as possible," but rather "lowest risk-adjusted expected cost, including mishaps." The latter correctly prices rare events.
>> We're facing the issue in Ontario where firefighters are bored out of their minds and are being used as first responders for anything and everything. They show up to random fender benders.
> Is that because the firefighters are bored or because they want to show the public that they're doing something valuable before the public realizes that we don't need so many of them?
If they need to do that, it's not because of the public. It's probably because they got a "challenge" from some clever idiot with a business or economics degree.
Also, people typically want something valuable to do, so they go find it. That's not something the proponents of our coming AI utopia seem to understand.
I think that's being a bit too much here. I can't speak for Ontario fire departments, but in the US, major cities have specialized trucks with crews trained for things specific to auto accidents. Hazmat training to deal with leaking fuel/oil/fluids to stay safe and clean up.
Keeping firefighters from being bored is why you see them playing pickleball or other sporty things around the firehouse. If your firefighters are that bored, you should look at having the chief replaced with someone better trained. Especially for the city the size of Ontario.
Bold to say that in a forum of software developers, haha
Ouch :’(
I better go show up to metaphorical fender benders more
yeah sure, they're so bored they spend half their week cutting people out of their wrecked cars. Just to make you think their salary is justified
You might not need (say) 100 firefighters for the day to day work in a medium city any more... but you absolutely need 100 firefighters when the large chemical plant goes up in a blaze.
It's hard enough in Germany to balance that, but we at least can draw on the advantage of Germany being decently settled which means we can have support crews come in from neighboring cities. But in the US where it might be the case that the nearest city with enough staff is hours of driving away? By the time you get enough staff on site, the entire plant is gone.
That is not how the US looks/works. The large chemical plant is in a large city (or suburb) where they can call plenty of other nearby cities for help.
Most of the land in the US doesn't have enough population to support a large chemical plant. The plant needs not only the people who work in the plant. It also needs schools, grocery stores, libraries, doctors... And that many people also really want things like sports teams. A small chemical plant can locate in a rural areas, but not a large one.
> They show up to random fender benders.
EVs can cause pretty bad fires from benign looking accidents. Perhaps this is for the best? Better safe than sorry as they say.
Or perhaps we should dial back on how many firefighters we keep employed at all times.
In my town every firefighter is also an EMT and every fire truck has an AED and ventilation bag. And the local firehouse is invariably closer to basically everything than the ALS ambulance is.
So over the last several decades, "firefighter" has really just become emergency responder, where "emergency" can be a lot of things that happen in society pretty often.
Firefighting is a a task with a pretty intrinsically bursty demand. You're employing them for the very peak of that demand and otherwise you want them working on relatively low priority things that can be dropped in an emergency.
> Or perhaps we should dial back on how many firefighters we keep employed at all times.
When there is a fire you still need enough at location in time.
The fact that there are enough in short distance with good equipment is one of the things which causes the low number of big fires: once the mandatory detector goes of for a little fire they are on site before it becomes big.
> Or perhaps we should dial back on how many firefighters we keep employed at all times.
The problem is you need a good number when there is a serious fire, even if it doesn't happen very often.
In the UK, we have quite a few 'on call' firefighters (about a third of the total) who are fully trained and are paid but are not full time. They typically work another job but are available during certain hours if required. I'm not sure if similar systems exist elsewhere.
A huge portion of the US is covered by purely volunteer fire departments. Communities pay for equipment and training and that is it. Response times are slow but it is really the only viable option in rural areas.
Not always slow. I had a kitchen fire at 4am from a microwave spontaneously combusting. Had the local deputy fire chief and local fire truck there within 15 minutes plus trucks from two other local towns.
At the federal level, FEMA and USDA offer extensive grants and low interest loans to fund fire districts in rural communities with a small tax base. I think basically every state offers similar funding assistance on top of that.
Looks like 80% of firefighters (or rescue personnel according to modern naming) in Finland are members of volunteer fire brigades or so-called contract fire brigades and they respond to nearly half of the total emergencies but over 90% of emergencies outside densely populated areas.
> We're facing the issue in Ontario where firefighters are bored out of their minds and are being used as first responders for anything and everything. They show up to random fender benders.
Aren't (many?) firefighters certified as paramedics?
In USA, most are not paramedics (ALS). Those are typically only advanced-care ambulances (blood, drugs, intubation, EKG/manual defib, emergency operations like trach tubes). But a lot of firefighters are EMTs (BLS). Oxygen, vent bags, apirin, Epipen, CPR, automated defib (AED).
We had this in NZ *years* ago at this point. Mate was a fire fighter for a few years (until his knees gave up, it's a brutal job) and he went to almost no actual fires. It was everything else.
I very rarely see actual candles being lit anymore. It's almost always fake candles with led lights.
> We don't really need multiple exits in case of fire
Tell that to the residents of Grenfell Tower.
Fire escapes are an anachronism for buildings with a smaller footprint that aren't terribly high. Brownstones and smaller (older) apartment buildings in NYC are classic examples. Some of those buildings were also timber framed so having an external and secondary exit was imperative, particularly after major 19th century fire disasters.
What really happened is we started building concrete and steel core buildings that were particularly high so external fire escapes weren't really practical or necessary because the of the building height and the fact that modern buildings typically nearly always have multiple sets of stairs with fire doors, which saved a bunch of lives in one of the WTC towers on 9/11 but not the other (where all 4 staircases were breached).
Having a single point of egress is an incredibly bad idea as evidenced by Grenfell Tower.
> We're facing the issue in Ontario where firefighters are bored out of their minds and are being used as first responders for anything and everything.
With climate change we can repurpose them as waterfighters when sea level rise, floods and berm breaches become an acute problem.
Firefighting in a large city versus a small town I assume are different, but the firefighters I know would never describe themselves as bored. They get paid to spend the majority of their time hanging out with friends, barbecuing, working on their cars, enjoying life, etc for the occasional hugely important and often terrifying life saving firefighting work.
They deploy more often than when I was a kid for EMT type work in place of or as first responder for ambulances. But, none of them would ever describe their day to day as boring.
Interesting article.
I went to a Victorian era school in London and it had one of those cast iron fire escapes going from the ground up to the 2nd floor (3rd floor to the Americans) and it was a good deal of fun to play on!
In my last year of school, it was cut off completely and not replaced. Hmm, weird. Apparently it was unsafe and someone decided it wasn't needed because there were two other stairwells.
Fast-forwards to after my graduation and returning to work at the school as a teacher. The top floor is out of bounds to everyone. Why? The fire escape is missing :-)
During a real fire at my school, also in the UK, a cast iron fire escape partially collapsed. I don't remember any mention of injuries, and it was replaced with a new, steel staircase within a few weeks.
Making the main staircase more fire-resistant is great but I'm not fully convinced by the arguments for removing external ones instead of having both.
If the main stairs do turn out to be impassable for some reason despite the new measures, I'd much rather have the option to risk taking an external fire escape even if it might be rusty or blocked by clutter.
Every large building in the last 100 years has been built with multiple integral fire-safe paths of egress for the very reason that a path should be available if one is blocked. The design of buildings is very much conditioned on tables in the fire code about how many paths of egress, how large they must be, and how long they can be based on how many people need to be evacuated. (Not to mention how many hours of fire each door and partition must be designed to resist.) It's kind of a PITA. And it works very well.
External fire escapes are merely the retrofit allowed to old single-stairway buildings to get them to be vaguely as safe as a modern building.
A lot of buildings now require at least two stairwells for buildings over three stories. There's talk in Massachusetts of easing that requirement the requirement to four or six stories, which is more common worldwide and could help build more affordable housing.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/28/opinion/stairwells-bu...
Note: This requirement is a contributor to US apartments being ugly. Depressing line corridors, and only one side of windows unless you're in the corner. Other countries don't have the double stairway requirement, and are prettier as a result.
What would burn in those manhattan buildings? Are the internal walls wood?
I don't know what would burn in the building I live in now. It's all cement construction. The internal walls are brick with gypsum over. The window coverings and furniture is flame resistant. I suppose I'd be screwed if my downstairs neighbor had a bunch of flammable stuff though. Also we have an underground parking lot full of cars... maybe I should invest in a ladder.
A old brick-wall building is basically a pretty shell protecting a wood frame.
Not usually for anything over a few stories. Most of those taller buildings are a combination of masonry and steel. Steel started being used in the 1880s/1890s.
The most essential unspoken purchase for anyone living higher than the ground floor in an older building is an emergency escape ladder.
Is that because a fire extinguisher is spoken or that it's not essential?
A fire extinguisher will not get you out. A fire extinguisher it to clear a path so you can get to the path outside. Many people get this wrong - they put the fire extinguisher by the door, but if you are at the door you should be going outside not trying to fight the fire. (most fires are small enough that you can put them out with a fire extinguisher so this seems to work - but that is not the primary purpose)
What you need is a path out when there is a large fire. Both exits and fire extinguishers are part of that. Everything else is a nice to have (sometimes very nice), but you still have to prepare for when everything else fails.
Is this really a phenomenon? Where and since when?
No one told me in either of my apartments.
In my 4th floor apartment in Tokyo there was a box containing what seemed to be basically an abseiling harness. Instructions in Japanese but seemed like if shit hits the fan you smash the window, clip it to the building and get yourself down to street level asap.
Our AirBnB in Tokyo last year had a box mounted on the balcony which (according to the instructions on the outside) held some crane-like thing with a harness to let you swing out over the balcony and rappel down in the case of emergency.
My parents had something very similar to this in their apartment in the midwestern US in the 80s. I recall it as being an aluminum mount with a chain ladder.
I remember those often being mentioned in “keep your home prepared in case of fire” educational materials, too. I’ve just never actually seen one.
>What would burn in those manhattan buildings? Are the internal walls wood?
Me? I'd certainly prefer that didn't happen.
Which is why I'm glad I have a fire escape. Should there be a fire that either blocks access to the main stairwell and/or my front door, there's an additional egress point at the other end of my apartment.
I'd much prefer that there wasn't a fire at all, but I'd much rather have multiple egress points for me and my animals than having to sit and wait to die of smoke inhalation if a serious fire were to rip through my (more than a century old) apartment building.
Wood is a great construction material. It has better insulation value than brick, and the CO2 costs are vastly better.
Your flame resistant furniture will pyrolize just fine once the apartment gets hot enough. Just takes one idiot keeping their budget lithium bike inside to ignite the whole mess--ask me how I know.
The construction is there to isolate suites and delay the spread, but don't kid yourself that a given suite doesn't contain enough fuel to have a major fire, given the right ignition source and tinder.
In Japan, the main stairs of the building is designed like fire escapes. It is unenclosed and mostly on the side of the building. When I first saw them I thought it was silly to have the stairs open to the environment during rain and snow. I finally realized they have double purpose.
In S. Korea almost all apartment buildings have their own escape lapel rope attached to the window and all have a fire proof blanket in the cabinet near the exit door.
If one can have an entire 20min piece about how bad fire escapes are and how bad they were from the start it kind of begs the question as to why they were allowed on new construction to begin with. Surely somebody was in favor of them?
Perhaps a comparison to the current breaker requirements in the electrical code and other "industry excess" shall we say, in the IBC is in order.
But Grady isn't gonna make that comparison because when a man's salary depends on not understanding something he won't understand it.
Building code is a very, very, very dirty sausage factory. It's a disservice to everybody to just hand wave that all away at a dozen points like is done here.
> The story of their decline is a fascinating case study in how building codes actually work. I’m Grady and this is Practical Engineering.
... who else immediately heard the signature melody of his intro after reading these words?! I certainly did.
> When New York City updated their building codes in 1968, exterior exits were officially prohibited for new construction.
Fascinatingly in Germany it is just the other way around. If you have an old building that was built before fire codes mandated two independent exits for every residential room, and the window cannot be reached by a fire ladder, you are mandated to retrofit an escape ladder if you do a renovation of the building.
> Fascinatingly in Germany it is just the other way around.
You're contrasting rules for new construction with rules for existing buildings during renovation.
It's difficult and often impractical to retrofit a protected stairway into an existing building, but it's not a major hardship to include in new construction (although requirements can substantially change layouts)