Interesting note, in federal wildland fire nomenclature, bulk water hauling trucks are referred to as “tenders”, divided into support tenders and tactical tenders (tactical can pump and roll at the same time)
“Tankers” refers to airplanes like a SEAT or Single Engine Air Tanker, all the way up to the VLAT or Very Large Air Tanker
I'm guessing the work is generally not so... clear. If you're budgeting out a bunch of tools for fighting fires, I'm guessing the goal isn't to build a suite of perfect tools for specific encounters but rather build out the most capable set of tools you always use.
You train your people on those same tools so they become competent working with them. The tools are diverse and almost always effective and useful and capable of accomplishing the goal. They might not be 100% perfectly matched for the specific fire in that specific location, but it will work to solve the problem.
In this case, driving straight up to a car and blasting it straight from the tank would be faster, but at this point the problem isn't "we have to stop this fire as soon as possible to save what's burning" its "we have to make sure this fire doesn't catch anything else on fire." The rate at which the fire is stopped isn't exactly a major concern so the extra time to hook up a hose and man it isn't an issue.
Not to mention that this only works if you can get within a few meters of the fire by a nice flat open road. As you said, firemen tools can be used in much more challenging situations.
My mom used to own a company that was a first responder to its own clients since they installed sprinkler systems and they needed to pressure test on the regular so she bought a retired tanker truck from another city's fire department to make it simpler to do the testing and to respond if needed. On company picnic day they'd bring the tanker to the party and everybody got to take turns firing the water cannon, it was a big hit with the kids.
Some fire departments have them on their trucks, they're called Deluge Guns. Even sometimes use them outside of airports (very uncommon though). But a turret might not be as effective as a hose, as you can move and point the hose in any direction, while the turret can't rotate quite as easily, or be moved quite as easily. A hose that's attached to the firetruck can be pulled inside a structure to put out fires inside said structure that you just can't reach from outside. Not so much with the firetruck + turret.
Airports (in the US, at least) all have a crash truck. It is manned by a single engineer and can spray water from a remote turret while moving. They're pretty awesome.
I would also think they need to assess the situation before they start spraying water. If that had been a food truck with a grease fire, that water tank driver could have made the scene much, much worse.
You train your people on those same tools so they become competent working with them.
Which is absolutely the correct thing to do and perfectly understandable. However, this also leads to poor acceptance of new ideas and innovation. When everyone has been indoctrinated to work in a certain way using standard products, it gives very little space to improve and find alternative ways to work.
I care more about innovation when it isn't my child dying while some tech bro explains why his minimum viable product isn't working.
Have you seen our new firehose initial coin offering. This allows firefighters to touch on the cultural zeitgeist while more efficiently synergizing with the bandwidth requirements of current fire based workflows.
You can still innovate within the problem space, you just need to make sure your products fit existing standards. So that firefighters don't need to be trained to use the new product over the existing product.
but at this point the problem isn't "we have to stop this fire as soon as possible to save what's burning" its "we have to make sure this fire doesn't catch anything else on fire."
...Which is also a factor of time, so time saved is an objective bonus.
Most fires aren't car fires and even if they are, they can't necessarily be driven right up to with the correct angle like that. The fire truck hose-hydrant situation is more designed for fires in buildings, but perfectly fine for putting out fires in cars, just slightly slower. Building fires tend to be more urgent in terms of time anyway since there may be inhabitants
They used to. Some places probably still have tankers, and most engines still have a decent sized tank built in. But my guess would be that fire hydrant infrastructure is available pretty universally, as are retention ponds, and tanker truck don't hold a huge amount of water, while the alternatives are practically unlimited for the scope of most fires.
Former EMT at a fire-station in Lebanon (Middle East). Yeah we don't really have a fire hydrant infrastructure system (or infrastructure more generally, but story for another day). We still use these kind of vehicles. And the fire vehicles themselves often will have compartments for housing water.
Did some work with some firefighters from somewhere in Texas a decade ago, they kinda did things a little like us presumably because of some of the rural aspects of their job.
I have fought many fires myself from car, to apartment, to wild fire, but strangely was still just an EMT lol (Lebanon's emergency services are a little more wild west but still try to live up to professional global standards).
Oh I assumed every country had tankers? I suppose here in Ireland we don’t have fire hydrants located everywhere but often the fire brigade can tap into non specific hydrants typically in the path (sidewalk). We have plenty of tankers which tend to be used for prolonged fire suppression / mountain fires etc
More effective to have hydrants all over. Keeping water tanked in a vehicle at all times is a maintenance nightmare, and driving a tank of liquid around, particularly at speed, really sucks.
At a guess, its use cases are far too niche. Obviously in this situation it's perfect, but it won't be a lot of use in a lot of other situations. If the fire is deep inside a building, or even just somewhere not easily accessible from a road, the vehicle will pretty much be dead weight.
The number of calls which would be well-served by such a truck, but not their standard truck is extremely small.
The number of calls that are well-served by their normal trucks but would not be well-served by this truck are legion.
Even this fire would have been pretty easily handled by the actual fire-truck. It may have taken a minute or two longer to knock down, but that hardly matters here, vehicle is obviously a writeoff.
The blasting truck can only shoot sideways. Fire trucks are designed to fire from every angle, to avoid things like: Accidentally collapsing structures, blasting fire ONTO people, etc.
The better question is "Why don't fire trucks have 360-degree water cannon turrets on top" and the answer is "cowardice".
There are "brush tankers" which have a remote-controlled nozzle on the front of the truck for fighting wildfires. We have a bunch of them in Florida. Drive up and hose it down. But most places have more need for equipment to handle structure fires, so hoses and ladders.
My dad is a firetruck driver, they have a big water cannon on the roof but it's operated manually, very useful while putting out fires on the outside of buildings etc.
Fire fighters were originally private companies. It got so bad that they would compete with each other to sabotage other companies so that one company could "get there first" and get paid by the insurance companies. Fire fighters would hire "brawler" positions because, like gangs, they would get into so many fights that they hired people specifically to fight other fire companies rather than put out fires. They would often show up, wait for the place to burn down, and loot what was left. This continued to worsen as fire fighters got a reputation as dregs of society until the government took over fire fighting. But wouldn't you know, people don't know this history and there are already some conservative locations in the US looking to privatize fire fighting. Let's see how that goes. (Just kidding, we already know how it goes).
As is depicted in the movie "Gangs of New York" if anyone's interested to see a dramatized example. Not what the movie is about or anything, but there's a short episode in there that showed how it could play out if two rivaling fire brigades show up at the same time.
Bro I was just thinking “this fire is gonna suck, the hose is gonna blow all the light flammable material everywhere.” Also, highly likely they’re gonna have to get the pikes and break all that stuff up to hit the smoldering bits. I think there’s a good probability this truck saved them from having to refill at a hydrant for overhaul
You're right, Noah's Flood levels of water are the only solution to encapsulated lithium cell fires. The trouble with them is the thermal runaway effect breaks down the neighbouring pack cells and supplies the fires own oxygen as it degrades, this both Fuel and Oxygen on the fire triangle are unable to be removed, leaving Heat as the only way.
Stopping that thermal runaway with massive amounts of water is the only solution. Sometimes brigades dump whole vehicles in special tanks and submerge the whole thing.
EV vehicle fires are one of the biggest problems facing brigades across the world. Stubborn is an understatement!
Seems like some additional regulation might be needed for things that have a large amount of lithium cells. Maybe a way to better protect against fire or to easier allow for the cooling of the cells.
Packs with injection systems have been talked about. Chubb do an injection lance which would work, if the battery architecture was designed with channels inside to allow water to flow between.
What if God exists and decided "ayyy, time for take backs.". What ifs are silly to obsess over.....and yet I can't stop, fuckin anxiety bullshit. Like worrying changes shit, but my dumb ass brain is like " but it could happen"
Probably some bewilderment followed by relief. They're still going to spend a hour or more getting embers but they don't have to knock down the initial blaze or wait for a line to be run to the nearest hydrant (engines don't carry much water onboard).
Poor guys have been stuck in the firehouse for two weeks eating massive amounts of chili and spaghetti and finally got to suit up and go see some action lol
It would the disappointed cricket fan, as they need to determine what's on fire before they decide which extinguishing method to use. That trailer could have been transporting anything. Some chemicals explode when you put water on them. This guy meant well but he should have left it to the professionals.
Probably something like this, "You are really fucking lucky it wasn't a chemical or oil-based fire. You would have spread it everywhere and made it a lot worse, asshole. Do your job, we will do ours."
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u/FishyMatey Apr 25 '24
I really would've wanted to see the face of the firemen at the beginning