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Comment by udp | Hacker News Reader

Here in the UK, if you call the emergency services they ask which service you require (police, ambulance, fire). It would be absolutely unthinkable to respond "fire" if there wasn't a fire. How does it work in the US? Is the fire dept. a different number that is somehow acceptable to call for this kind of problem?

There have been a number of times when I've been in difficult situations with severely drunken or otherwise vulnerable people, and every time I've called the local police station (rather than the emergency number) and they've sent someone over. But it's always the police I would call - never the fire brigade.

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The answer is that fire departments respond to any call where there could be an injury or other related need, because they are also EMTs, and in the U.S. you just call 911 and tell the operator what's wrong. If you say you want an ambulance, chances are, you'll get an ambulance... and a fire truck. This is partly due to the fact that most ambulances are a private service and don't really represent the service of the city (which firefighters / fire EMTs do represent).

The problem is that we don't really have a sort of emergency first responder triage department. The operators are it. There's isn't an EMT who can speed to the scene in a fuel efficient car on his own to bring you some bandaids or water and check your blood pressure (e.g., in the case of a homeless person prone with a needle in his arm), and then call for more help if needed, so, instead, a $300,000 hook and ladder truck full of 4 highly trained firefighters (also trained as EMT) is deployed to do the same thing.

That doesn't really answer the question.

Why is a fire truck helping a drunk instead of an ambulance?

Fire crews are also trained as EMTs. So when you're trying to get an EMT somewhere as quickly as possible, that will often actually be a fire crew.

In San Francisco, the Fire Department is one of the city's ambulance providers. They have ambulances:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/SFFD_amb...

Apparently sometimes they send the actual fire trucks, though. It would be interesting to know if these stats included the ambulance service.

Where I live (in the SF East Bay), I often see multiple units servicing medical emergencies. I can't help but think that the extra units show up so that they can inflate their stats for community service when contract time comes.

Another factor here is that in most places, it seems including San Francisco, fire stations are much more evenly distributed across the city than hospitals with ambulances based out of them. So just in terms of travel time, the fire department is usually able to arrive before an ambulance, sometimes significantly.

> Here in the UK, if you call the emergency services they ask which service you require (police, ambulance, fire). It would be absolutely unthinkable to respond "fire" if there wasn't a fire.

Although most people have no problem saying "police" not "ambulance" when they see someone in psychiatric distress.

(Admittedly that's sometimes the right thing to do. Police have section 136 powers to take people to a place of safety for assessment, and there's started to be street triage services working with the police).

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