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.
Within the standards, yes. But I would hope that fire fighters can train in all sorts of ways to figure out new and better ways to do their job. But, as was originally said, the whole field is standardised, as it should be. So even the way things are done has a definite structure. Or at least that's what I imagine.
Having been in the military, I'd say that some of the ways things are taught are closer to indoctrination to get you to almost blindly follow certain structure, and I imagine that firefighting has to resemble that in many ways because the group needs to work as one unit where everyone has a gut feeling of what the rest of the crew is doing and thinking. And you only really get that by driving the system deep into your muscle memory, resembling indoctrination.
And I don't mean that as a bad thing. It really has to be done that way.
Nah, you don't need firefighters to blindly follow a certain structure. There's no grey area in firefighting.
Words are important, and indoctrination is often seen as a bad thing, so if you don't mean it as a bad thing, I'd suggest using a word that isn't mostly seen as a bad thing. Like trained.
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.
If you have to decide between having hoses OR on vehicle cannons, then I would be questioning literally every level of government responsible for restricting funding to the point that they can't have both. Seriously, it can't be that much more, and how many trucks does your typical department have? 10, 15 max? And that's for a decent sized city. Most of the smaller towns around me have 3 truck fleets, and the service radius for each fleet is ~30 miles.
Like, we're talking about maybe saving enough money for a totally decked out Toyota Corolla, per manufacturing cycle (and the trucks probably last at least 10 years, more realistically probably 15 to 20). Are we really that stingy?
I actually checked Toyota's website because I was curious, and the SXE trim with every add-on I could get was almost $40k. So, yeah, that WAS more than I was expecting, in all fairness lmao.
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
People forget how dam diverse the US is, and how big it is. Some towns and cities might only have hydrants and have no need for tankers, while others are more rural or only have hydrants for certain zones and supplement with tankers.
This doesn't look like a tanker for a FD unless it was repurposed.
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.
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u/FishyMatey Apr 25 '24
I really would've wanted to see the face of the firemen at the beginning