Are Engineers Getting Hosed by Firefighters?

Pavement replacement or a new fire truck?  Early retirement for the fire chief or a new pump station?  New emergency response radios or new bike trails?

Cities across the nation need to be spending more money on infrastructure renewal and upgrades.  We need to be spending much, much more money.  It is important that our local governments make better data-driven decisions on what has priority.  We clearly have limited fiscal resources and need leaders that are filling to make the hard decisions (great leaders understand the difference between a "tough" decision and a "hard" decision).

The how and why of fire department budgeting needs to be carefully examined.  Fear mongering and hero worship (engineers need a little more hero worship from the public) needs to be replaced with the hard data.  Ignoring the water resources part of fire safety by overly concentrating on the firefighting portion is the "easy" decision.

Check the report in the Boston Globe - Plenty of firefighters, but where are the fires?:

"But as a recent Globe story reported, city records show that major fires are becoming vanishingly rare. In 1975, there were 417 of them. Last year, there were 40. That’s a decline of more than 90 percent. A city that was once a tinderbox of wooden houses has become—thanks to better building codes, automatic sprinkler systems, and more careful behavior—a much less vulnerable place.

As this has happened, however, the number of professional firefighters in Boston has dropped only slightly, from around 1,600 in the 1980s to just over 1,400 today. The cost of running the department, meanwhile, has increased by almost $43 million over the past decade, and currently stands at $185 million, or around 7.5 percent of the city’s total budget."

Engineering is responsible for this huge improvement in fire safety, but are we the ones that ultimately are getting hosed?