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.