Posted on 09/09/2015 7:12:06 AM PDT by george76
Over last 20 years, annual fires in the US declined by about 50% while career firefighters increased more than 50%? [ Full title ].
while the annual number of fires in the US declined by 47% between 1983 and 2013 (from more than 2.3 million to 1.24 million), the number of paid career firefighters increased by 56.5% (from 226,600 to 354,600), according to data from the National Fire Protection Association here and here. In 1983 there were more than 10 fires in the US per career firefighter, but by 2013 there were fewer than 3.50 fires per paid career firefighter. What could explain these trends? Could it maybe be because public sector firefighter unions are involved?
...
oddly, as the number of fires has dropped, the ranks of firefighters have continued to grow — significantly. There are half as many fires as there were 30 years ago, but about 50 percent more people are paid to fight them (see chart).
This is no secret. Across the country, cities and towns have been trying to bring firefighting operations in line with the plummeting demand for their services. Many solutions have been attempted: reducing the length of firefighters’ shifts; merging services with neighboring towns; and instituting brownouts, which temporarily take an engine out of service. But often, these efforts have failed against obstinate unions and haven’t reversed the national increase in fire department payrolls.
Local firefighter unions have fought hard to grow their ranks as fires decline. Although private-sector unions have been diminishing, representation of government employees has remained strong, and firefighters have been among the beneficiaries.
(Excerpt) Read more at aei.org ...
its peak government.
All paid for by our centrally-planned, socialized financial system: unbacked, fiat money, manipulated interest rates, and unlimited government debt.
We need more firefighters because two EMS can no longer lift the average obese American.
I’m not in a city with paid firefighters but they spend a fair amount of time responding to accidents.
“...obstinate unions...”
Might be more like aggressive, sullen, boldly assertive, pushy...
IMHO
How many of that increase are paramedics? Since fire departments provide ambulance services now?
I noticed that nowhere in the article did the author normalize ‘fires’ with absolute acreage ablaze. Yellowstone was a ‘fire’. Smoldering weeds by the highway from a dropped cigarette is a ‘fire’. This article is essentially an anti-firefighter union screed, not that I’m a big fan of unions, public sector or otherwise.
Easy to be superficially critical of this trend. In our area, every community had a volunteer fire department. When the alarm rang, you dropped what you were doing to fight the fire. For a whole host of reasons, this model is not workable any longer.
That doesn’t mean as citizens we shouldn’t be keeping track of how our money is spent.
I have no doubt that, like most governmental agencies, the ranks of firefighters are bloated. But many firefighting departments also provide EMT services - this was not true when I was growing up.
In Indianapolis, the “Solution” to the Fire Department’s Budget and retirement underfunding issue was to take over 7 of the 8 Township Fire Departments, many volunteer, thus increasing the number of people “Paying in” to the retirement Program.
like teachers.....used to be that you had 35 kids in one room....and yet the single nun in front of the room could handle them all...
these same unions try to destroy and eliminate all volunteer fire depts..
“If you fund them, they will hire more govt. employees”
What is interesting is that Firefighter Unions resist any change such as brown-out of engines (mentioned in article). They justify their existence by to demanding big engines to be called out common traffic accident and with paramedic calls. Local departments put thousands of miles on big engines, retire them and all the while they never fought a fire.
When you need them you want them to be there and ready.
My town of 27,000 or so hasn’t had a structure fire in over 3 years. 98% of the calls are EMS. And the FD bills $500 for the ambulance run.
I’m all for volunteer fire brigades. Our town has one. This is NOT big government - this is citizens taking care of their own.
Yet ours, and all others, are now having trouble finding volunteers.
Ironically, 50 years ago, when all able-bodied men worked, the volunteer spots in our town’s brigade were all full.
Now the USA has 90 million adults out of the work-force, and not looking for jobs either, yet volunteer fire brigades can’t find enough people to fill their ranks.
More destruction caused by the welfare state.
Answer: Public Employee Unions. And they are in the process of bankrupting the cities and counties where they work. The current municipal bankruptcies in California show that the cops and the FF’s comprise 75 to 80% of the bankrupt citie’s budgets. And it’s not going to go away quietly, because of the attendant pension bomb that’s attached.
This really misses a giant point. We call them fire departments because of the culture. But from the 1940s, they have flipped and usually 90% or their runs are emergency medicine and rescue, usually car wrecks.
This article is garbage statistically. His point may hold, but what needs to be counted is the number of rescue and EMS calls. If that is dropping, then we can talk, but it isn’t.
But statistically counting fires to decide if you have too many firemen is silly. That is usually far less than 10% of the calls in this modern era. Alarms, building codes, sprinkler systems, better appliances, have made fires go away.
But the EMS side of the house has exploded in demand, and in capability.
I retired after 25 years from a fire department in a city known for its crime problems, a year and a half ago. During the time I worked there we lost several fire stations the number of full time firefighters was reduced by approximately 15%. During the same time period our call volume more than doubled. This is largely because people now call 911 for every nonsensical reason you can think of. The number of fires in our jurisdiction did go down a little... I am not sure by how much... but there are still a large number of older homes there, and there are still a lot of people who smoke or are irresponsible idiots
The thing that did change dramatically were the number of people working at fire headquarters. Administrative staff at least tripled during the time that I worked there. So while I agree that this article is “garbage statistically” and may be largely barking up the wrong tree.
The fire department that I worked for is still an example of government run amuck. You have less people doing much more “work” (Largely babysitting people who no longer want to take care of themselves); and three times the number of people performing administrative tasks that are basically meaningless adherence to useless government regulations. So there is a lesson about government and how inefficient it makes everything.
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