Ambulances and fire trucks are gregarious in the United States? You rarely see one without the other in any sort of emergency situation. Since moving back to the U.S. a few years ago, I have often idly wondered why whenever you see an ambulance at the site of an incident, there is also, almost invariably, a fire truck. A comment from a friend, recently, made me look into this somewhat strange situation.
I did warn my audience that I write about things that catch my fancy, however seemingly trivial, but this is not quite as trivial as it appears.
All sorts of questions arise when you think about it. Why do you need a fire truck when a person with a badly sprained ankle needs to be taken to hospital? Especially a fire truck with six firemen in it. Why do you need a fire truck, with six firemen in it, when someone has a heart attack, and has to be taken to hospital as quickly as possible? An ambulance with paramedics would seem to be perfectly adequate response.
If there is a car wreck, then an ambulance, a fire truck and police vehicles to control traffic, make excellent sense, even though there always seem to be far more fire/police officials standing around watching rather than doing anything useful. One is tempted to think that they all have nothing much to do most of the time so, when an emergency occurs they all come running. Sort of like official rubber-necking, I suppose.
Anyway, I decided to investigate a little further. I went on line to see if I could find an explanation of why ambulances and fire trucks are gregarious. There are innumerable sites describing fire services throughout the country and you would think, since they are all independently operated by local governments, there would be different accounts of why they have this gregarious nature, or not. Each of the numerous sites I looked at, felt obliged to explain why ambulances and fire trucks always show up together, which was a little strange.
Even stranger, and this peaked my imagination a little more, the explanation from each site was identical. That made no sense, unless those responses had been orchestrated from a central location. How was that possible when each service was independent and, perhaps more interestingly, why had it happened?
I went back to the comment my friend had made. He said he had read that fire truck history, together with union involvement, was the answer to why the almost symbiotic relationship between ambulances and fire trucks existed. I looked a little deeper with this idea in mind, and the answer is logical, if totally anomalous, in today’s world.
When the United States started building towns across the country, most of those houses were made of wood, and had wood burning stoves. Fires were endemic, and many homes burned down. The bigger the town, the bigger the fires. Each community needed fire trucks, and larger communities needed multiple fire trucks. Ambulances were unheard of at that time; doctors arrived on horseback or, later, in their own vehicles. In any case, hospitals were few and far between, so there was nowhere to take the patients anyway, so ambulances were superfluous.
Gradually, as housing standards improved, and wood stoves were replaced by gas and electricity – not that long ago – the number of house fires decreased significantly. However, by this time, there was a fire-fighters union fighting for their members’ rights, even as the need for firemen, and fire trucks was decreasing. Equally, as technology advanced, fire trucks became more sophisticated, bigger, and needed more firemen to operate. The inevitable result was large numbers of fire trucks, and firemen, with very little to do most of the time. Equally inevitably, that resulted in calls for reduced fire department budgets, personnel and equipment. The fire-fighters’ union had to act.
They saw an opportunity in the growth of hospitals and ambulance services. In principle, both services offered first-response capabilities, so why not develop a joint strategy that would off-set the declining need for fire services. Legislation was born that obligated the fire service to always be present in any emergency – the power of lobbying. Hence, a fire truck became legally required to help with a sprained ankle.
The cost of maintaining a fire truck service has to be astronomical. Those trucks must do 2-3 miles to the gallon at most, the maintenance on all the equipment aboard must be horrendous, let alone the cost of multiple firemen.
Now I am not suggesting that we don’t need the fire services. Obviously, that would be a stupid idea, but the “regulation” that all incidents of any variety need a fire truck is equally stupid.
How we came to this situation is understandable. Perpetrating that history is dumb and wasteful.
