[lendaddy]

I take 911 calls and dispatch police...I don't dispatch fire yet but they sit right next to me and I do put up the calls. This is in a fairly big city....

Our Fire dept is a gigantic money pit. Fear of liability has made the whole deal crazy expensive, we respond to everything as if the world is about to end. Idiot busy-body calls in a drunk sleeping on a bench:

911:Is he responding?

IBB:No, I mean I didn't want to get too close...he didn't respond when I asked if he needed help.

We then send an entire fire engine (lights and sirens) with 6 guys on it. We also send a Squad (suburban with two guys), we also send an ambulance (lights and sirens) 2 men, you know the drill. This crew of 10 guys wakes the idiot up and maybe gets him to a local mission (which he promptly walks away from to sleep on a bench with a 40.

The firefighters union doesn't complain because these calls "prove" that we need to maintain our high staffing levels due to demand (the above incident gets logged in the stats as a priority one medical call).

In our city ~75% of the calls our fire dept goes on are medicals (never without an ambulance as well), 10-15% are unknown car accidents, 10-15% are false fire alarms, and the remaining 1-2% or so are actual fires of any significance.

There is no doubt in my mind that our fire dept is at a min twice as big as it needs to be, may even 4x.

Don't take this to mean I don't respect our guys or think they are worth their wage, they certainly are... it's that we are being mislead as to how many we need and what exactly we have them doing.