The average American fire truck is huge in comparison to its international counterparts. This size is the result of a hundred years of evolution in firefighting, but today the scale might actually be causing more problems.

Cheddar Explains

Do American Fire Trucks Need To Be So Massive?

the average american fire truck spans 40 ft, is 10 ft wide and 12 ft tall and their international competitors are usually much, much more compact, not to mention the US one just looks old. It's a difference that's resulted in contrasting approaches to firefighting bigger might not always be better. American fire trucks weren't always this massive. During colonial times, most homeowners kept buckets on their front porch and when members of the Rattle watch would raise the alarm, citizens would form bucket brigades and pass the buckets from the water source to the fire. Now this obviously required a lot of cooperation and clearly wasn't that efficient. So in 1721, Richard Newsome patented a type of fire pump. The pump was mobile mounted on a wooden traces, but bucket brigades would still have to dump water into the hopper. So as you can imagine, these weren't the most effective either. Firefighters would show up late to a scene often exhausted from lugging around all the equipment. In many cases, fires died out before the regrade even arrived. By the turn of the 19th century, larger us cities relied on horse drawn wagons with steam powered water pumps. Finally, the internal combustion engine allowed for the introduction of the fire truck, which hit the roads in the early 1900s. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, American cities began growing taller and taller and this presented a new kind of challenge. So new york. Firefighter Daniel Hayes designed the haze letter, which was mounted directly on the fire truck and could be raised and lowered in the years following World War two fire departments added these so called cherry pickers to their trucks. This bucket attached to a bending arm allowed firefighters to position themselves closer to previously unreachable corners of buildings. Both ladders and the cherry pickers required a larger sturdier traces from then on the fire truck continued to grow larger as each new model was designed to house more equipment. Today, the average truck is loaded with pumps, hydraulic ladders, tanks that can hold roughly 400 to 500 gallons of water and a slew of other equipment. Also, the term fire truck has come to encompass a variety of search and rescue vehicles like ladder trucks, engines and tiller trucks, but regardless of the specification, almost all american fire trucks are larger and that comes with a larger price. The average cost of a widely used type one engine goes anywhere from 400,000 to $600,000 and a 100 ft aerial ladder alone goes for around a million. That's a big price tag. When few of the calls forwarded to fire departments are actually fire related. Of the 36.6 million calls made to all of the U. S. Fire departments. In 2021 only 1.3 million or about 4% were fire related. A large majority of the other calls are to accompany ambulances to the scene of auto accident and other medical emergencies Beyond the price tag. Heavy duty vehicles like fire trucks can pose risks to smaller cars, Pedestrians and cyclists. They're heavier and have a longer braking distance. Heavy duty trucks make up just 4% of all vehicles on American roads, yet they account for 7% of pedestrian fatalities and 11% of bicycle fatalities. In the summer of 2018, lawmakers in Baltimore pushed for the addition of bike lanes, which would in turn create narrower street lanes for cars. But the Baltimore Fire Department opposed the proposal, releasing a nine minute video suggesting bike lanes would impede their ability to maneuver to a scene. The 10 ft wide american fire truck struggles to squeeze through traffic on the average 10 to 12 ft wide american road lanes, especially in older cities with thinner, more congested streets. So what should a fire truck look like? Well, maybe like this in europe streets tend to be tighter, so fire trucks are shorter, nearer and more compact, making them far more maneuverable. Their aerial ladder fire trucks can also reach just as high as the american counterpart, even though they're a third shorter in Singapore fire trucks or so called red rhinos are even more compact, yet they still have the space to fit five people, a medical technician and four firefighters and also all the necessary medical equipment. Now, some places like Beaufort County in South Carolina have already opted for a smaller, all purpose response vehicles. In 2010, its fire department had to replace three fire trucks, which would have cost them $1.4 million $675,000. San Francisco's Fire department currently also uses smaller Vision Zero engines that are 10 inches shorter than the trucks they're replacing can make a U. Turn in just 25 ft and have an equally robust firefighting capacity. No matter where you are in the world, the common purpose of fire departments is the same to save lives. If a smaller truck that takes up less space on the road can do that just as efficiently. Maybe it's time to rethink outside the big old red box.