I’ve never been a firefighter. I have no idea how it works.
Take a volunteer fire department in a small town. Is there always at least one person on duty? Or are there times when the station is empty?
There’s a fire in a building. Somebody calls 911. How is the information relayed to the individual firefighters?
Who decides how much response to send to a fire? What do they base this decision on?
What happens if a second fire is reported while the first in still in progress? Do firefighters and equipment at the first fire leave to go to the new fire? If so, who decides who leaves and who stays? Who decides what equipment goes? Or is there some group kept on standby that didn’t go to the first fire?
Who decides when a fire is big enough that the firefighters need backup from other towns? Is there some central firefighting authority that has command over all of the fire departments? Or is it something they work out between them on a one-on-one basis? Is it always the same towns that respond for backup or is there some system of rotation? If supplies get used up fighting a fire in another town, does the town that had the fire pay for them or the town where the backup fire company is based?
What happens during parades? Do all the fire department in the parade keep part of their staff on standby back in their hometown? If there’s a big fire, do firefighters and vehicles leave the parade respond? Are the vehicles in a parade ready to be sent directly to a fire or do they have to swing by the station to pick some stuff up?
Let me preface this with my lack of qualifications:
My father and grandfather were both career firefighters. I spent 8 years in EMS, which had me working alongside both paid and volunteer firefighters.
I’m using the situation that would occur on an EMS call, and it’s been my experience that fire departments work similarly.
If there was a call that came in for, say, a car accident, the ambulance that covers that area responds (I’m assuming here that that squad isn’t doing another call at the time. When that happens, the dispatcher would move other squads around to cover the area.
Hypothetically, let’s say that my squad was moved to cover an area where a squad has responded to a call already. My squad would then extend our coverage radius to include both my normal area, and a portion of the area that would have been covered by the squad that has currently responding to that car accident. For instance, I may have to cover my area and the top half of theirs, and another squad would cover their region and the southern half.
For fire departments, there’s a lot more equipment and machinery to move, so they may not redistribute all their resources, but those neighboring districts would expand their coverage area to include the one that has been affected.
Does that make sense? I worry I’m not explaining myself very well.
Okay, so if I’m understanding it, there’s a dispatcher who presumably gets notified by a 911 call. The dispatcher then contacts the fire department that covers the location of the fire. The dispatcher is also aware that that town’s fire department is busy and has an existing plan of which other nearby towns’ fire departments will cover in case there’s a second fire in that town.
So the dispatcher effectively acts as a central authority who knows what fire departments are currently busy and which are available.
That’s a good way of looking at it. Central dispatch coordinates everything, and the various departments are generally aware when a fire department is dispatched, and kind of know ahead of time that they have to increase their coverage area until things settle down.
I don’t have direct experience, but my father was a volunteer fireman in a small mid-west rural town during the 1950’s and 60’s. For a small town of 2,500 the fire department was well equipped with three relatively new firetrucks, a tanker truck, and an old unused truck mostly used for display and parades. Dad took care of maintenance and it was my job to sweep the station and dust off the trucks every week.
The station was unmanned and vacant except for Sunday mornings when many of the volunteers would skip church to play cards. The volunteer group was very much a social organization as it was civic.
When there was a fire, everyone’s home phone would ring continuously instead of the intermittent ringing of the normal party line calls. When the receiver was lifted the operator would state the nature and location of the fire. The fireman would rush to the station and leave with a truck whenever enough people had come to man the truck. Late arrivals would drive to the fire themselves.
There was a fire chief who made all the decisions about how to fight the fire, when and who to call for help, etc. I doubt there were ever two fires to fight at once but I imaging they would have figure it out on the fly.
You even answered one of the questions I thought of but forgot to include. (What happens when a member of the crew doesn’t show up? How long do they wait before leaving without him?)
This site says that 70% of US firefighters are volunteers. I was surprised that the number was that high and in fact I’ve seen higher numbers in other sources that I can’t find right now.
A relative was a paid NYC firefighter who lived over an hour from the city. He said that a number of the volunteer firefighters in his hometown were NYC firefighters.
One point that I’d like to make here, thinking about this later, is that each truck/station has what we called a “knockout pager,” which looked something like this:
When a call would come in via 911, the dispatcher activates an alarm that broadcasts to each of those, and allows the squad to hear the emergency situation and respond immediately. For instance, firefighters will often go to the supermarket to get food and other necessities, like you would at home.
This way, if a particular squad is not at the actual station when the call comes in, they have the ability to leave from wherever they happen to be. At least in my area, other squads could hear the radio chatter, so if a squad was tied up (for instance, I personally was caught by a train quite a few times while on the ambulance), a squad from another district would start responding to avoid anymore loss of life or property.
So, for instance, if I was responding to a call and got caught by a train, I’d say something like, “Central [Dispatch], Squad 7…response delayed due to train.” Dispatch would acknowledge, and send the closest squad that was on the other side of the tracks. And the other squads could hear that exchange, so they knew to be getting ready to respond to the call.
Central Dispatch is kind of like an Air Traffic Controller. They’re tasked with knowing where everyone is, and how to best utilize the resources as needed.
