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Comment by netfire | Hacker News Reader

Why use firefighters at all in situations where there isn't the potential for a fire to happen? It seems like police and any needed EMT workers could handle the situation without needing bigger fire trucks that are more expensive to run and more disruptive to traffic. I'd think the police would also be closer to respond to such situations as they may already be on the street or in a nearby police vehicle.

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>Why use firefighters at all in situations where there isn't the potential for a fire to happen?

They have the equipment and muscle power to move people. What are a couple of EMTs going to do with a 600 lb guy on the third floor of an apartment building, or someone trapped in a smashed car?

Yes, it makes sense to have firefighters with better equipment/muscle power present in those cases (the smashed car is also a potential fire hazard).

Those seem like more edge cases (most people don't weigh 600 lbs and most car accidents are minor collisions with little to no fire danger). That doesn't justify the extra expense of using them in other situations like the ones mentioned in the article which could easily be handled by police and EMTs.

The problem is they often don't know what they're going to find until they arrive on scene. If that 600 pound guy is having a heart attack you don't want to have everyone sitting around for an extra five minutes waiting for the engine to arrive.

The EMTs aren't going to sit around, they are going to be performing first aid and calling the fire station for additional assistance. Do we really need to incur such additional cost on the odd chance that first responders will need to carry someone the weight of a sumo wrestler down stairs and that whoever is calling 911 won't be able to give them a physical description of the victim.

>The EMTs aren't going to sit around, they are going to be performing first aid and calling the fire station for additional assistance.

Right... and it's going to take that guy an extra five minutes to get to the hospital.

They can't depend on what people tell them on the 911 call. The average person is completely unreliable under stress.

You've got to draw the line somewhere. There's always situations where having more people/resources would have made the difference between life and death. In an ideal world, you've have a fire station on every block, dedicated traffic lanes just for emergency vehicles and you'd use a helicopter to get someone to the hospital as quickly as possible when it might be slightly quicker than regular ambulance transit.

It just not reasonable to use that many resources in 1 in a million scenarios like you are mentioning (where a 1-2 police officers and 2 EMTs couldn't handle the situation, the person calling couldn't provide enough information to determine whether fire fighters were needed and making it to the hospital 5 minutes sooner would have made a significant difference in the outcome of the victim)

Per the article, only 1.5% of the incidents the SFFD responded to involved fires and they had a budget of 330 million dollars. How much money could be saved by using police and EMTs in those situations? (and used in more effective programs that are actually going to help the homeless get off the street).

I'm not sure you'd actually save much money even if you could get by with EMTs. You still need a certain number of firemen on duty in case you actually have a fire, and it's not like you don't have to pay firemen while they wait for one. Labor costs dwarf everything else for that kind of service.

It would be interesting to see a cost breakdown of the police, EMT and fire department labor, transit and equipment costs too see the potential savings (or lack thereof). Given that the SFFD is only responding 1.5% of the time to fire-related incidents, you could probably reduce the number of fire department stations, trucks and employees considerably if they only responded to fire-related emergencies.

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