Defund the Fire Department?

Firefighter ranks keep growing as the number of fires falls.

If you live in a city, there’s no escaping the sound of sirens. Live somewhere dense like New York, and the sound of sirens is more common than just about anything else—birds, honking, silence. I learned this when I lived across from a fire station in Brooklyn.

But one thing puzzled me—even though the fire trucks were racing all over the city at all hours: there didn’t actually seem to be that many big fires. No news coverage of apartment fires or electrical fires or home fires. Then one day, I was on the subway, and there was a sick passenger, and the train stopped and the announcer said it would be holding at the station while emergency crews were called. I exited and walked up the stairs. There, on the street, were four fire trucks waiting at the entrance, with crews coming down into the subway to help the passenger. Roads were closed. Traffic was stopped. The subway wasn’t going anywhere.

Don’t get me wrong, those firefighters were doing essential work bringing medical care to the person who needed it. And every day, they risk their lives and their sanity to keep responding to all of the hazards of modern life. The fire station across the street from me in New York had a memorial to its many members who had died in the September 11th attacks. Unless you or a family member is a family member, you can probably never understand just how difficult and harrowing the job can be.

But there seemed to be a disconnect between the problem—there was a sick, maybe mentally ill, person, on the subway, and the response— four fire trucks. The more I started looking into this, the more I wondered why we send fire trucks to so many non-fire calls. Since 1980, the number of career firefighters has kept growing, while the number of structure fires has fallen (see the below chart.)

Meanwhile, wildfires are burning across the U.S. West, and the federal and state government don’t have the resources to put them out.

This isn’t just a problem in New York. “Fire department operations as currently configured are unsustainable,” a civil grand jury in Santa Clara County wrote, in 2011, after looking into complaints that the fire departments had over-deployed multiple firefighting apparatus in response to non-life threatening medical emergencies. Why did they do that? Fire equipment was dispatched regardless of what a 9-1-1 caller reported, whether it be a broken arm or a person stuck in a crosswalk, until firefighter “eyes on the scene” saw that there was no fire. Some of the other reasons they sent multiple fire trucks are . . . not convincing.

Reasons firefighting equipment is sent on calls that aren’t fire-related:

In my latest story, I talk to a city manager and fire chief in Upstate New York who tried to cut back the fire department to balance the city’s budget and got a lot of pushback. I also talk to some cities who changed their fire response, sending ambulances instead of fire trucks, or discontinuing the use of red lights and sirens for non-emergency calls. (When I was a kid, my neighbor climbed up on our roof to get a stuck ball and then got stuck himself, and my parents were mortified when the fire department showed up, sirens wailing, to help him get down.)

Again, to be clear, I appreciate all the wonderful work firefighters do, including helping stuck neighbors down from a steep roof! I just found, in the course of reporting this story, that the modern fire department has not changed much with the times. Nor has the federal firefighting system, where until recently, people were paid as little as $13 an hour. As fires rage in the west, it might be time to reevaluate what firefighters do, and where they do it.

Here’s the piece: As Wildfires Burn, Are U.S. Cities Spending Too Much on Their Fire Departments?