Emergency Services Part 1: The Fire Department

Why Emergency Services Show Up

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There are three things almost everybody on the planet knows fire, EMS, and police. Three different services, three different cultures, and completely different histories. And somehow, when the worst moment of somebody's day happens, one of those three usually ends up standing right in the middle of it. A house could be on fire, a man could could collapse in a grocery store, or somebody hears glass break downstairs at two o'clock in the morning. Either way, when someone is hurt or someone is scared, or somebody has absolutely no idea what to do next, they call one of those three. And somebody comes. We're so used to that idea that it almost feels inevitable. Of course there's a fire department, of course there's an ambulance, and of course there are police officers. And of course you can pick up the phone, describe whatever disaster has just showed up on your doorstep, and somewhere a dispatcher will start sending people your way. But none of it was really inevitable when you think about it. These systems had to be invented, and they weren't invented together. Fire departments, ambulance services, and police departments come from completely different systems in different centuries and for different reasons. And then over time, they kind of got tangled into each other into this big, huge thing we now call emergency services. And for the next three episodes, we're going to be pulling them apart.

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Not because they're separate, but because each one has its own story big enough to deserve plenty of room. So part one is going to be fire.

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How human beings went from watching entire cities burn to ash to building an organized profession around fighting one of nature's oldest threats. Part two is EMS. And that story is very different. But because somewhere along the way the ambulance kind of stopped being transportation and became medicine. Real medicine. And then EMS became the I guess the place society started sending nearly everything else. Heart attacks, overdoses, car wrecks, psych emergencies, falls, homelessness, loneliness, or even chronic illnesses. Things that are kind of emergencies, but there are things that probably aren't. If somebody needs help and nobody quite knows what kind, most of the time an ambulance gets sent. And then in part three, we'll follow another completely different path. Police We're gonna see how communities went from watches and constables and sheriffs and posse to real organized departments. Patrol cars, radios, detectives, SWAT teams, and a little bit of the modern institution that we recognize today. Three services, three really big histories, and one strange question connecting all of them. How did we decide who comes when something goes wrong? We're starting with the oldest enemy of the three. Something humans were terrified of way before cities were even a thing. Way before governments, and way before anybody had ever even heard a siren. Fire. And for a long time, when anything started burning, you were pretty much on your own. And today we're gonna talk about fire departments.

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This is part one of our emergency services arc, I guess. If that's what you want to call it. But we're gonna start out um a little bit before anything was really a thing.

Life Before Fire Departments

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Before cities and before I guess before all of it.

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Ever. No big red trucks, no big hoses, nothing none of it. No ladder trucks or hydrants, nothing. If your home caught on fire, the fire department was just whoever happened to be standing nearby. Whether that be your family or your neighbors or somebody with a bucket. I mean, there were some people who were brave enough to even get close and go inside. But fire was everywhere. And it wasn't really not wildfire. There fire was in your house. Like everybody used fire inside their house constantly. They had to cook their food, they had to heat their rooms, uh, it would they'd use candles to actually see where they were going. And fire would power all kinds of things, like workshops, and think about a blacksmith.

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A lot of that happened inside their house back in the day.

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Humans had spent thousands of years learning how to control fire, anyways. And then we built our lives around the assumption that we could keep controlling it, which worked pretty well right up until it didn't. Because before electricity, fire wasn't something you occasionally had to deal with. It was a part of your daily life. You had oil lamps and candles, uh, hearths, furnaces, ovens, torches, all that good stuff. But all of it was sitting inside buildings that were made from materials that were really, really enthusiastic about catching on fire. Wood and thatch. There was a lot of cloth and everything back then just wanted to burst into flames. And when one of those buildings did catch on fire, there was another problem. The building next door was usually only a few feet away. And then the next one, and the next one. So when cities were starting to build themselves up, like early cities, fire wasn't really a threat to a house. It was a threat to the entire idea of a city.

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One cooking accident could just take down a whole neighborhood, and one neighborhood could take down a whole district.

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And depending on the wind, if you had a strong wind, it could turn the whole thing into something that no one could stop. But humans eventually developed a pretty complicated firefighting technology.

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I guess you could say it was pretty complicated, but if you think about it, they used to pass buckets to each other.

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And they called it bucket brigades. People would form a line between whatever water source was close and the fire itself. One person would fill the bucket and then they would pass it to the next one, and then again and again, and then they would throw the water from the end of the line onto the fire, and then the empty buckets would work their way back around. So it's just one big conveyor belt. And everybody keeps going until either the fire goes out or there's really nothing left worth throwing water on.

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Is it primitive? Yeah, kinda. But there's I mean, there is something recognizable in it. Um there's an organization to it and roles and people working together.

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There's a system in there. Because eventually we started realizing something that seems pretty obvious now. You can't invent firefighters after the building is already burning. And that's I mean, you need people ready before the fire starts.

Rome Builds The Vigiles

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And one of the places where that lesson was just impossible to ignore was ancient Rome. Now Rome was huge. Like at its height, hundreds of thousands of people were packed into a city filled with little narrow streets and workshops, lots of cooking fires and lamps and furnaces, and really, really crowded buildings.

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Now the Romans called a lot of those apartment buildings that everybody kind of gathered in, they were insulae.

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And some were several stories high. And while Rome is famous for you know marble temples and stone monuments and engineering that's still pretty ridiculous to this day, ordinary Rome contained plenty of timber, like floors, roofs, doors, shops, furniture, a lot of their interior structures, all of it it had fire inside of it.

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Everywhere. Like at night.

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If you were to look out over the city at night, you would see thousands of little flames in people's windows, and it would just illuminate the whole city, which meant thousands of opportunities for one of them to end up somewhere it shouldn't.

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Rome Rome burned a lot.

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Like Rome caught on fire a lot. And early attempts to deal with that were pretty scattered. Officials could organize responses, and public slaves could be assigned to night watches. And then the rich Romans, they kind of maintained their own groups of people who could respond to fires. So there were people responsible for watching the city after dark. And the problem was Rome kept getting bigger. And the bigger it got, the more dense it got, and the more complicated. And fire doesn't really care whether your government is still working out the details. So eventually, Rome did something insanely familiar, actually. It built a fire service. So in the year 6 AD, Emperor Augustus established the vigils. And it's a permanent organization kind of responsible for watching Rome for fires and then responding when one breaks out. And then suddenly, now we have something that starts looking kind of suspiciously like a fire department. Now these guys were divided into seven cohorts, and there were thousands of people in there. Each cohort for uh they were responsible for Rome's for two of Rome's 14 administrative regions. So they had barracks and commanders, they had assigned territories, their equipment was kind of stored around the city, but most importantly, they were able to be there before the fire. Now at night, these guys would patrol the streets and they'd look for smoke and flames, any dangerous activity, and anything else that could just become everybody's problem before morning.

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Even their name kind of tells you what they were doing.

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Vigils, watchmen, the people keeping vigil, which means one of the earliest recognizable professional firefighting systems wasn't really built around racing to a fire after somebody called. Now, they kind of did dig into wet blankets and mats a little bit, and they would use that to smother flames or kind of start trying to protect nearby structures. But they also had access to force pumps, which is a very, very, very, very, very early ancestor of the basic idea behind pumping water onto a fire. But if a building was already fully involved, their most effective firefighting tool could be considerably more aggressive. They tore things down. A burning building, and sometimes the building beside it would just be flat. Anything they did anything necessary to create a gap that the fire couldn't easily cross. So basically, if you couldn't get the fire out, you could try to just remove its next meal. And then suddenly firefighting starts looking even more familiar. Not really the technology, obviously, but a Roman vigil could it would have absolutely no idea what to do with a modern pumper.

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But the thinking is recognizable.

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Detect the fire early and then get people there really, really fast. And then organize them under a commander or a chief, and then make sure you bring your special equipment, you protect any exposures, and you stop the fire from spreading. You create fire breaks and prevent the next building from becoming part of the incident. So 2,000 years later, you know, the equipment has changed insanely beyond recognition, actually, but the basic part of fire hasn't. Now, those guys in Rome also had another job. They helped police Rome at night. So if they if they came across suspicious people while they were patrolling, they could detain them. They were allowed to do that. So here, almost what, 2,000 years ago, we already find fire protection and public safety kind of tangled together. So there's a group of people who are just kind of roaming around a city watching for trouble and responding when something went wrong. So yeah, we're headed in the right direction.

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And I love this because the firehouse feels really modern, if you think about it.

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Like the fire trucks sitting behind the big doors and bunks and the kitchen and you know, gear lined up and ready. And then you've got a bunch of people just waiting together for something that hasn't happened yet. But Barry Denith, all of that technology is a really, really old idea. Somebody should stay awake and somebody should be ready. Because the fire isn't gonna make an appointment, it's not gonna just let you know, hey, I'm about to catch. The Romans, they've built stations and smaller posts around the city, so the the guys could cover different areas. And archaeology has actually found remains connected to them. So we know where some of these ancient fire stations were, which means there are places in Rome where forever ago firefighters were essentially sitting around waiting for the next call. There were no radios or phones or engines, but the same job.

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Wait and watch. And when somebody's ordinary night starts to turn into the worst nightmare, they go.

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There's something a little comforting about that, I think, because so much about the fire service seems ancient when you're inside of it. Like they've got their own traditions and ranks and stations and people who are just obsessed with equipment and a lot of dark humor, and then a lot of waiting. But you've got that sudden transition from just nothing happening to everything happening at once. Then obviously, we can't draw a straight line from the Romans to the firefighter who's sitting in America at a station today. History doesn't really work that neatly. So Rome's system changed. The Empire changed, the um, their version of the fire department changed, it disappeared. Different cities started kind of developing different ways of protecting themselves. So for centuries, firefighters would often that would kind of fall back onto the citizens and watchmen and local organizations and guilds and volunteers. Whoever could just be organized quickly enough when the fire bell started ringing, and there was no big worldwide evolution from Rome to now. But Rome had started the idea. They demonstrated that it could work, and they demonstrated that fire protection could be organized, and it could have dedicated people and equipment with assigned districts and leadership and stations, prevention, all that. Like it was possible. They proved that a fire department was possible. Humanity just didn't hadn't decided exactly what it should look like yet, and that would take a very long time. Because

Fire Protection Becomes A Business

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as European cities started to grow again, they ran straight back into the same ancient problem. More people, more buildings, more fire. Except now the cities were becoming larger and wealthier and even more crowded. And eventually, fire protection became valuable enough that somebody finally realized something else. You could make money from it. Which led to one of the strangest periods in the history of firefighting, which was a time when firefighters might arrive at your burning building and they would look for a particular symbol on the wall, and then they would decide whether your fire was actually their problem or not. So imagine your house is burning. Like you run outside, and somebody has already raised the alarm, so they started ringing the firebell, and eventually some guys show up with buckets and hooks and ladders and all that good stuff. But before they start fighting your fire, they look at the front of your house and they're looking for a little metal plaque. It's a symbol and it's proof that you paid the right company. No plaque, wrong insurance company. Sorry, that's not our fire. And according to one of the most popular stories in firefighting history, they might simply just let your house burn. It's a fantastic story. I mean, it's cold and it's insanely weird, but it's exactly the kind of historical detail you hear once and immediately repeat for the rest of your life. There's just one problem. It probably didn't work that way, at least not nearly as often as the story would have us believe. And to understand why fire insurance companies were sending firefighters into the streets in London in the first place, we kind of got to go back to a bakery.

The Great Fire Changes London

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September 2nd, Pudding Lane in London. And sometime after midnight, a fire broke out in the home and bakery, they were both the same thing, of Thomas Fariner. Now, Farner obviously was a baker, and he even supplied bread to King Charles II. Now he later maintained that the ovens had been properly extinguished, and whatever happened inside that bakery, by around one o'clock in the morning, the building was burning. And ordinarily that might have been a terrible. It might have been terrible for Thomas. Maybe terrible for the neighbors, too, depending on how close the buildings were. But London had spent the summer of 1666 becoming something really, really, really close to a giant pile of kindling. And it had been really, really hot and dry, and water was just scarce. And much of the city was packed really, really tightly together. Timber buildings, a lot of thatch and pitch, wooden upper stories that sometimes leaned outward until buildings on opposite sides of a narrow street almost touched. Now, there were yards that were filled with hay and straw, and workshops that were using open flames and warehouses with oil and tallow, coal, and alcohol, all inside one of the largest cities in Europe. Throw in some wind and a strong bit of a flame, then oh God. Anyways, a strong easterly wind, it started driving flames from building to building. Down Pudding Lane toward the Thames. And when fire reached warehouses along the river that were filled with combustible goods, yeah.

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London had a problem that buckets were just not going to solve.

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There was no London Fire Brigade. There wasn't even an organized citywide fire department. People had leather buckets and axes and hooks. Now they had these little kind of primitive water squirts and pumps, but nothing that could handle anything really. But one of the most effective tools available was the same brutal strategy people have been using forever. Destroy the building before the fire can. So pull down houses ahead of the flames, create a gap, and starve the fire. But imagine trying to make that decision. Your house isn't burning, not yet, anyways. And somebody shows up and tells you we need to tear it down because the fire might get here. Now, today that kind of decision happens inside an incident command system, and it's there's all kinds of procedures and law and equipment and all that stuff. And a lot of people who spend their careers studying fire behavior. But London in 19 in not in 1666 had considerably less structure in how it operated.

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And even more confusion.

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So Samuel Pepys watched the fire unfold and eventually went to King Charles II with the recommendation that buildings needed to be pulled down. So King Charles would give the order, and then fire hooks were used, and then they used uh believe it or not, they used gunpowder to blow up buildings and make larger fire breaks. But by then, though, the fire had just become enormous. John Evelyn walked through the city while it burned, and he described streets glowing with heat. Like molten lead was running out of buildings and pavement that was so hot that people and horses could barely get across it. At one point he wrote that the only thing likely to stop the flames was blowing up enough houses to create a gap wider than the fire could cross. So think about that for a second. They didn't have turnouts, or and turnouts are the clothes that the firefighters wear, like the jackets and the pants and all that stuff. They didn't have any CBAs, which is the oxygen mask and the tanks that they have on. There was no thermal imaging cameras, there were no two and a half inch attack lines. There's nothing. So it's just a thousand people standing in front of one of the largest urban fires in history trying to take an inside and the whole city. They're trying to take an entire city apart faster than the fire can take it down. And somehow, eventually, they actually got a hold of it. By Wednesday, September 5th, the Great Fire was mostly under control. But London had been completely transformed. More than 13,000 houses were destroyed. Eighty-seven parish churches, the Royal Exchange, the Guild Hall, and the old St. Paul's Cathedral.

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Entire neighborhoods had disappeared. The fire had burned almost all of the old city of London.

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And afterward, London kind of faced a question that cities have faced after major disasters ever since. And it's how do we keep from this happening again? Buildings were rebuilt, rules were changed, construction changed, but there was another problem. Money. Imagine, like, think about owning a home or a business in the 17th century in London. One spark could take down everything that you owned. And there was no government disaster program coming afterwards. Like there was no Red Cross, there was no there's nothing. There was no homeowners' policies or GoFundMe's or any of that stuff. You could be financially destroyed in a single night. And where there is terrifying financial risk, eventually somebody invents insurance. So in

Fire Marks And Insurance Brigades

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1680, a physician, economist, builder, and financial speculator named Nicholas Barbon established an organization known as the Fire Office. Now property owners could pay to insure their buildings against a fire.

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Now that alone was a pretty clever business idea.

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But Barbon and the other insurance companies that followed really quickly after him, they discovered something that was a little bit more interesting. If your company had promised to pay when somebody's house burned down, it is kind of in your company's financial interest to stop houses from burning down.

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Which may be one of the least romantic origins of professional firefighting imaginable.

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It's not we must protect the people, it's more like, oh no, we insure that building, so we kind of gotta make sure it doesn't burn down.

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Or else we gotta pay out a bunch of money. But anyways, motives aside, it worked.

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Insurance companies started employing men to fight fires and protect insured property. Some recruited Tames watermen. And those were guys who were already accustomed to hard physical work around the river, and they brought him in to serve on their firefighting teams. And then companies bought equipment, fire engines, buckets, ladders, tools, and they organized people whose job was to respond when something caught on fire. And then came the little plaques, the fire marks. If you insured your building, the insurance company could attach a metal emblem somewhere on the outside of the house, usually in the front, kind of high up, but not too high where you can't see it. Different companies had different symbols. The Sun Fire Office used a sun. And other companies had their own recognizable designs. But those marks became one of the most famous artifacts in firefighting history, and you can still find surviving examples on some of the old buildings today. Which brings us back to that story.

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Fire. Engine arrives, firefighters look up, wrong fire mark.

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Everybody folds their arms and watches your house disappear. Again, great story, but the London Fire Brigade's own historical research said that there is very little evidence that insurance fire brigades really acted like that, but don't say it never happened. In fact, surviving company rules the ones they could find, they indicated something a lot more sensible. Firefighters were expected to help at fires even when the property belonged to another company, or it wasn't insured at all. And when you think about fire for like two seconds, of course they were. Fire has a fairly serious respect problem when it comes to property lines. You can't really stand in the street and say, you know, well, 14 Pudding Lane isn't insured with us, so we'll just wait until the fire reaches number 16 and then we'll start. By then your insured building is also on fire, so it doesn't really matter. But an uncontrolled fire threatens everything around it. Your customers, your competitors' customers, the entire block. So the insurance brigades had a strong reason to cooperate. Their firefighters might belong to competing companies, but they would all end up working together anyways. The fire didn't care. And the fire marks themselves weren't just on eight, like they weren't just an 18th-century version of, you know, please pick this house. They helped identify insured properties after a fire, which was supposed to be their main reason for doing it.

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They advertised the company, and before street numbering was reliable, as if it's reliable now, they could even help people identify buildings.

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So they mattered, but not necessarily in the sinister way that the story and the legend suggests. Still, there is something kind of fascinating happening here. Like for the first time in centuries, London had multiple organizations maintaining groups of trained people and firefighting equipment that was all ready to respond before the fire started. And it wasn't no, there was no neighbors grabbing whatever they could, no bucket brigade thing anymore. It was actual firefighting organizations. And competition started driving improvement. If you're an entrance company and a faster pump means you save more buildings, you want a faster pump. If you can train your firefighters and it reduces loss, then you train your firefighters. And if putting stations in very strategic places means that the crew can get to the fire faster, that's where you put the equipment. That's where you put everything, as closer to the risk. Firefighting was starting to become specialized, but it was still kind of fragmented. There were different companies and different uniforms and equipment, all that. But London kept growing. Eventually, the insurance companies started looking around and realizing something. They were all spending money maintaining separate firefighting teams to fight the exact same fires. So they started to cooperate a little bit more formally.

London Unifies Then Goes Public

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In 1833, there were ten independent insurance company brigades. They got together and they combined their resources into something called the London Fire Engine Establishment. Now, we're getting very, very close to something modern. One organization, multiple stations, and a unified force. Leading all of that was a man named James Braidwood. Now, if you spend enough time digging through firefighting history, Braidwood's name shows up a lot. And so he'd previously organized Edinburgh's fire department.

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And he believed firefighting needed training and discipline and organization.

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They uh he thought that you needed to really have an understanding of how buildings burned. So he pushed firefighters away from just spraying water from outside towards more deliberate tactics. And he emphasized something that feels completely obvious to a firefighter today, but back then it was still kind of developing as a professional idea. Firefighting is a skill. You have to learn how to do it. You have to practice, you need command, you need tactics, you need equipment that's actually designed for the job, and you need people who know how to use it the right way. The London Fire Brigade now describes Braidwood as the father of the British Fire Service. But there was still one really big problem. The London Fire Engine establishment was not really a public fire department. And it was still funded by the insurance companies. Now, these companies were effectively providing fire protection for a growing metropolis because protecting London also protected their money. And eventually, that arrangement broke. On June 22nd, in 1861, fire broke out of cotton. Fire broke out at Cotton's Wharf on Thule Street. So there were warehouses along the Thames that were packed with goods, like uh hemp and cotton, tea, coffee, and all kinds of spices. Now, that's the kind of inventory that makes an entrance executive begin sweating before the fire even gets anywhere close to it. So the London fire engine establishment responded. And by six o'clock that night, 14 engines were working on the fire, including a steam-powered engine and a floating fire engine operating from the river. James Braidwood was there. While directing operations, a warehouse wall collapsed and Braidwood was killed. Now the fire continued burning for two weeks.

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The damage ran into millions of pounds.

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And after that, the insurance companies finally said that some like they finally said something governments around the world would eventually hear in one form or another. We can't keep doing this ourselves. In 1862, the companies wrote to the British government arguing that responsibility for protecting London should belong to some kind of public authority. And Parliament did eventually agree. So the Metropolitan Fire Brigade Act passed in 1865. And on January 1st, 1866, the Metropolitan Fire Brigade began operating as a public service. London finally had what would recognize, what we would recognize, anyways, as a municipal fire department. So think about the path that we just went down.

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A bakery caught on fire, a whole city burned down pretty much. People lose fortunes. And then businesses invent fire insurance.

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Insurance companies hire firefighters to protect their investments. And then those firefighters become organized, and then organizations merge together, and then the training gets better and the technology improves. And then another huge fire proves that protecting an entire city can't just be somebody's side business. It has to be a public responsibility. It has to be a big thing. So nobody sat down in 1666 and designed the modern fire service. It grew disaster by disaster, mistake by mistake, fire by fire. Which is going to become something of a pattern in this story. Because across

Franklin And The Volunteer Tradition

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the Atlantic, another version of the fire service was developing. And this one would become especially important to the way firefighting works in the United States. Because we didn't have a king or emperor or insurance company. We didn't have professional city departments or anything like that. Just a bunch of ordinary people that they decided when the bell rang they would go. The volunteer firefighter was about to become an American institution. Well, actually, there were a lot of buckets. In colonial America, fire protection was everybody's problem. Just like over in London. If somebody yelled fire, neighbors came running from every direction.

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Now people formed their lines and buckets and all that kind of stuff we've talked about. But they got a little bit more reckless with it sometimes.

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Like they'd run into the house and start throwing furniture out of the windows. People would just haul whatever they had into the street. And if the fire, if it got bad enough, somebody would start pulling the building down. Sound familiar? It wasn't very elegant. It wasn't in London either. But there was really no other option. Because the government was probably not sending you a fire engine. There might not even be a fire engine.

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And then guess who? Ben Franklin started thinking about it.

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Which, admittedly, is a sentence that really comes before an unreasonable number of things in American history. Franklin was a printer, a writer, a publisher, an inventor, a scientist, postmaster, diplomat, and he was kind of a political philosopher. And eventually, at some point, he looked around Philadelphia and thought, We are not really prepared for fire. In 1735, Franklin published an article in the Pennsylvania Gazette about fire prevention. He wrote about the careless ways that houses caught fire, like hot coals that were being carried between rooms and dirty chimneys and open flames. The ordinary little mistakes that could become just catastrophic after everybody went to bed. And in classic Benjamin Franklin fashion, he offered advice, including a phrase you've almost certainly heard. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Franklin was talking about fire. When he said that, that is what he was talking about. Literally. He wasn't talking about like diet and exercise and all that good stuff. He was talking about fire prevention. But Franklin didn't stop at telling people to be more careful. He had heard about organized fire companies elsewhere, like in London, and he proposed something similar for Philadelphia. So a group of guys who would be responsible for responding whenever a fire happened. And it's not whoever happened to show up. He wanted a group. And he wanted, he wanted it to be organized ahead of time. So on December 7th, 1736, Franklin and about 30 other men formed the Union Fire Company in Philadelphia. One of the earliest organized volunteer fire companies in the American colonies. And this is where the American Fire Service starts becoming pretty recognizable. Members were expected to keep their own equipment ready: leather buckets, bags, and baskets. The buckets would carry the water, and the bags and baskets were for something we don't think about quite as much today, which is saving your stuff. Because if your house was burning in 1736, there was no insurance claim for your laptops and TVs and all that stuff. People would go in and physically remove whatever they could before the building either burned completely up or fell down or disappeared. So that was furniture, clothes, any documents, food, anything that they considered valuable enough. And Franklin later described how members of the Union Fire Company were required to maintain their equipment and bring it to every fire. And they did something else that sounds suspiciously familiar. They met every month, they talked about fires, what had worked, what hadn't, how fire could be prevented, and how they could improve their response. There was also a social part of these meetings, because apparently one of the oldest traditions in the fire service literally is firefighters sitting around talking about fires after the fire is over. And the idea caught on. More people wanted to join Franklin's company, and eventually there were too many. So rather than making one huge company, Franklin encouraged people to form others. So soon Philadelphia had multiple volunteer fire companies. They all had different names and members and equipment, but they would each serve their own respective neighborhood. And slowly the fire company became something bigger than just a way to put fires out. It sort of turned into part of the community. Like a fire company could be a social club, which it still is. It could be a civic organization, it could be a neighborhood. Identity, a place where people gathered and they ate and drank and they debated politics and raised money. They organized events and built connections with the communities. The firehouse became one of the places where community happened. And that part of the fire service never really disappeared. Like, think about a fire service. Think about a fire department in a small American town today. The station may host fundraisers like fish fries or chili cook-offs or duck races.

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But maybe half the town knows somebody on the fire department.

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That relationship between fire department and the community is not a modern public relations strategy. It's baked into the DNA of the American Volunteer Fire Service. But there was another side to it. Because

Rivalries Exclusion And Real Consequences

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if your fire company represented your neighborhood and another fire company represented theirs, eventually somebody was going to make this competitive, right?

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And as everybody knows, firefighters they're not exactly known for being competitive people. Sure. Completely unheard of, right? Fire companies would race each other to fires.

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Like being first mattered. It meant prestige. It meant your company was faster, stronger, better. Your neighborhood could brag, your fire company could brag, and then your rivals had to hear about it for the next month or until the next fire. And once firefighting equipment became more sophisticated, the competition just went up from there. Hand-pumped fire engines required crews of men working together. Like the engine itself had to be pulled through the street, and water had to be supplied, crews had to get into position, and if two companies arrived at the same fire, they didn't always politely discuss, you know, unified command. Sometimes they fought, and not metaphorically either. They physically fought. They talk about rival volunteer companies getting into physical confrontations. Fire companies they kind of became associated with neighborhood gangs and political factions. Crews would race for access to for access to water, and then they would argue about who would work where. And occasionally, while the building was still burning, the firefighters would start fighting each other. Now the Smithsonian notes that the famous scenes of rival companies brawling in gangs of New York, they're exaggerated, Hollywood. But the underlying rivalry and violence were very real. Which creates the, I mean, possibly the most firefighter sentence in history. They arrived quickly, they brought the right equipment, and then they punched the other fire department. So imagine calling 911 today, because your kitchen's on fire. So engine one would show up, and then another engine would show up. And instead of actually getting a line out, everybody meets in the front yard to just throw some hands. What like what is that? There would be, I mean, if you did that these days, there would be so much paperwork. But back then, the fire companies weren't just emergency organizations, they were social institutions. And social institutions collect rivalries. Like, think about politics, uh, status, money, pride, sometimes violence. The story of volunteer firefighting in America is not really some perfect story of noble citizens selflessly serving their communities. There were, I mean, there were obviously like noble citizens serving their communities, but there were also there was a lot of exclusion and a lot of political undertones, gangs and racism, a lot of corruption and fighting. Because fire departments are made of people, and people bring all the complicated parts of society into the station with them. There's an especially important piece of that history that tends to disappear from the heroic version. Black Americans were often excluded from any formal volunteer companies at all. In Philadelphia, for example, black residents attempted to organize an African fire association in 1818. But the effort was actually shut down. And during periods of racial violence, whether fire companies protected black homes and institutions could depend on which company arrived and what was happening in the streets. At other times, individual companies did intervene to protect African American owned property from fires intentionally set by mobs. So the history is messy because the fire service was not, it wasn't standing like outside the American society. It really reflected it. And meanwhile, the cities kept growing. So Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, Boston, uh, Cincinnati, and Chicago, all of them were getting bigger. They were adding buildings and more factories and warehouses, which means more people, which means more fires. And the equipment was changing too. The bucket brigade was pretty much gone. It was just giving way to pumps. Hand engines, they got a lot bigger and a lot more powerful. And the way that the hoses were developed actually changed too. It actually, once they developed the new hose style, firefighters were allowed to move water a lot farther from a source than they used to. By the early 19th century, companies could connect lengths of hose and send water to the fire way more effectively than any bucket line ever could. But operating the machines took a lot of manpower, like a lot of manpower. Picture dozens of firefighters working the working of hand pumper. Up, down, up, down, up, down, again and again and again. As far as well, really for as long as the fire would burn. And it was brutal physical work. And the fire companies took huge pride, like huge amounts of pride in their machines. The engine wasn't just equipment for them, it was their engine. Companies, they would decorate them, they'd polish them and display them for people to see, they'd parade them through the streets. And if the company across town bought something better, well, then now you have a problem. It pushed for people to innovate. Fire companies wanted better equipment, more powerful pumps, better hoses, faster response times. And then in the middle of the 19th century, a machine kind of popped up that threatened to change the entire culture, anyways, which was the steam fire engine. Instead of relying on a line that exhausted human beings just pumping handles over and over again, a steam engine could power the pump. More water, more pressure, and less human muscle. From a firefighting perspective, though, this was pretty fantastic. From the perspective of the hundreds of volunteers whose identity was pretty much built around operating the hand engine, it was a little bit more complicated. Technology was starting to remove one of the reasons that it was necessary to have such a huge fire company. At the same time, American cities were becoming way too large and way too valuable to really tolerate unreliable fire protection. Political fighting and the companies that were brawling over who got the fire hydrant, though, that they couldn't afford to actually have that go on anymore. Businesses

Paid Departments Take Over Big Cities

SPEAKER_01 52:23

wanted it to be consistent. City governments wanted control, as always. And gradually, a lot of major cities started to do something that the old the volunteer departments just really, really, really resisted.

SPEAKER_00 52:39

So they would they started paying firefighters.

SPEAKER_01 52:48

And professional municipal departments, they started replacing or absorbing the old volunteer systems. So the Library of Congress, they noted that by the middle of the 19th century, improving equipment and demands for standardized urban protection were helping push large cities towards paid professional departments. And it wasn't always a peaceful transition, though. Because imagine being told that the organization that you built, the organization that your father belonged to, and the one that represented your neighborhood, like the place where your friends met and your like everything that you have done was being replaced by government employees. To city leaders, becoming this professional meant that you were going to have the consistency that they wanted. But to the volunteers, it looked like somebody was taking the firehouse away from them. And yet, the volunteer fire department didn't disappear. I mean, far from it, really. The model just kind of moved. As large cities built professional departments, volunteer companies remained especially important in smaller towns, like little rural communities, and places where a full-time paid department just wasn't practical. And that created something unusual about the American Fire Service. There was really never just one model. The big city, you had the career department, and then small towns, you had volunteer companies. Sometimes you would have combination departments, you'd have like independent fire districts, and then municipal departments, and then county services. Eventually, they even had like industrial brigades and airport departments and federal firefighters. They had military departments, wildland crews. There's a whole bunch of variations. All of them had different systems. They had there was the differences were huge. But they had the same basic promise, which was when the fire happens, somebody goes. And maybe that's the piece that Ben Franklin he would recognize the most. Like, not the diesel engine or the SCBAs or even thermal cameras. Like, definitely, definitely not the whole tablet mounted inside the, yeah, any of that stuff. The agreement, though, he would recognize. A group of people, they decided ahead of time that if somebody has if someone somebody's house catches on fire, they'll show up. Now that simple idea did survive, but by the middle of the 1800s, almost everything around it was about to change. Because fire departments were they were kind of entering into the machine age. So you had the steam-powered engines, um, city water systems, fire hydrants, they had the telegraph alarm boxes, and then you had horses that were bred and trained specifically to pull the fire apparatus in the first place. Their ladders were getting higher than anything that Ben Franklin could have even imagined. And suddenly, getting firefighters to the fire faster became almost as important as what happened after they arrived. The fire engine was about to become an actual engine. Nobody could engineer their way around. The fire already had a head start. So by the time somebody smelled smoke, found the fire, ran outside, raised the alarm, then found other people, got water, found the equipment, and somehow got all of it to the same place, the fire had been burning the entire time. So minutes matter in a fire. And 19th century cities were getting pretty good at creating fires that could do an extraordinary amount of damage in a few minutes. There were factories and warehouses, a lot of apartment buildings, and then they had gas lighting, coal stoves. There was just endless, endless ways to just burst into flames. The fire service had spent centuries getting better at fighting fire, but now it had to get better at getting there. And for a very long time, the alarm system was basically make as much noise as possible. Like they'd ring the church bells and watchmen would shout. They had firebells that specifically rang for fire, or people would just run through the street screaming fire. In a few cities, watchmen they would stand in towers and they would scan the rooftops looking for smoke. Now if they saw a fire, they would ring a bell in a specific pattern. So the other firefighters could kind of figure out roughly which part of the city was on fire. Which works sort of. Assuming somebody sees the fire, and assuming they ring the right bell, and then assuming the firefighters can hear it. There's a lot of assumptions that go into that. Like if everybody if they correctly interpret what the bell is trying to tell them, and then it's just a handful. And then after that, electricity arrived.

Alarms Horses Poles And Hydrants

SPEAKER_01 58:19

So more specifically, the telegraph. By the middle of the 19th century, humans had figured out how to send electrical signals across wires. So suddenly information could move faster than a horse.

SPEAKER_00 58:32

And somebody had a really obvious thought. What if we use this for fires?

SPEAKER_01 58:40

So Boston did. On April 29th, 1852, Boston placed the first municipal telegraph fire alarm system into service. Around the city were alarm boxes. So if somebody discovered a fire, they could activate one. The box would transmit an electrical signal identifying its location. That signal went to a central fire alarm, like a main office, and then from there, the fire department could be notified.

SPEAKER_00 59:11

So think about what just changed.

SPEAKER_01 59:14

Forever, the speed of reporting a fire had been one of the biggest limiting portions of firefighting in the first place. It was just limited by a human. Somebody had to run or someone had to shout or like physically carry the information. And now the alarm could just outrun anyone. Electricity could tell the fire department that there was a fire before any person could ever even reach the station. The little box on the street corner was basically like the ancestor of the modern 911 system. You didn't need to know where the fire station was. You didn't need to find a firefighter, you didn't have to find the box. Well, I mean, that's what you had to do. You had to find the box, but you knew what box it was. And then you pull it, and then the system took over. And eventually the systems developed around the numbered boxes. So firefighters learned the locations and the signals they were transmitted as patterns, like bell uh let's say, like bells or gongs. There'd be uh if you hit it three times and then you'd pause, you hit it four times and then pause, or two. That would be box three four two. So firefighters would know pretty accurately where they were going before they ever left the station. And by the late 19th century and early 20th century, these systems had spread through American cities, like wildfire. The game well system became especially widespread. Especially they dominated much of the American fire alarm market for a while. And there's something weirdly mechanical about the whole thing. There was no screen, no GPSs, or like no computerized CAD system for dispatch or any of that. Somebody would literally pull a lever, gears would turn, electrical contacts would open and close, and then a coded signal would travel through a wire and a bell would ring somewhere else. And then firefighters just took off. Well, they they ran towards an engine well, they ran towards a horse, actually. Because while communication had gotten pretty advanced with the electrical age, the fire engine still needed something to pull it. And for a while that something had four legs. The horse-drawn era of the fire service is one of those periods that almost looks impossibly cinematic now. Like they had the big, huge bay doors, uh polished apparatuses, there's a bunch of brass and leather harnesses. It's it's unique. And horses weren't, they weren't, you know, the random animals that were tied to the engine. Fire horses were trained for the job, as we talked about earlier. They were trained specifically what to do. They learned what the alarm meant. So in some stations, when the gong sounded or the bells went off, the horses would automatically move into position to be harnessed. There were systems developed so harnesses could just be suspended above the horses and then dropped onto their back. The doors would open and the firefighters would climb on, and just within a minute or two, a several thousand-pound piece of firefighting equipment was just barreling down the streets behind a team of horses. Now they didn't have seat belts or enclosed cabs or any of that stuff. And there were no traffic signals either, so people just had to really get out of the way.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:57

And everybody else, they mostly did.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:02

A lot of the times they got out of the way. Uh fire stations they found themselves changing around this process. The building wasn't just somewhere to store equipment anymore, it was being designed around response time. So you had uh the apparatus was downstairs, and then you had crews upstairs. The horses were always ready, and the alarms were wired into the station. So everything was positioned so the time between the alarm and hitting the street just got as short as possible. And that gives us one of the most famous pieces of firehouse architecture ever, which is the pole. The fire pole exists because stairs are pretty slow, especially when firefighters are sleeping or just barely functioning as it is. So Boston records a few instances where it was pretty beneficial, but the records in Boston show firehouses adding sliding poles in the early 1880s. And that was pretty much as departments searched for ways to get crews downstairs faster. Which means one of the most recognizable objects in firefighting history exists just because somebody was like, you know what, there's got to be a faster way to fall through a building. And it was. You could almost watch the modern fire station assembling itself. The alarms would come in electrically, a gong would sound or a bell would sound, uh, firefighters would slide down the they would slide down the poles, horses would move into place, harnesses drop, doors open, and you're away they go. Now every piece existed for the same reason, which was pretty much to save seconds. Because while all this was happening at the station, the fire was still growing. But getting there quickly only solved half the problem. You still needed water, and a lot of it.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:00

And carrying it in buckets had, well, obvious limitations.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:05

The early hand engine engines could they could get water from wells and cisterns and ponds and other sources and kind of pump it through the hose. But cities were also building something enormously useful just under the city streets, which were water systems, pipes and mains with a lot of pressurized water. And they started figuring out access points that firefighters could use to get into the systems fire hydrants. Now, the idea seems pretty normal now that fire hydrants were just they you don't you don't notice them anymore. They just kind of disappear into the landscape. Little pieces of metal sticking out of sidewalks and lawn. Now we when we paint 'em red and yeah, some people park near them when they're not supposed to, and that's a whole different story asking. Firefighter. Occasionally, somebody opens one in a movie so children can just, you know, play in the rain or whatever. But the hydrant fundamentally changed urban firefighting. Because instead of bringing the water to the fire, cities could put water everywhere. So now an engine could show up and connect to a nearby water supply and just keep the water flowing. So hose companies, those guys, they became even more important as municipal water systems got bigger. And that helped firefighters to move water from any kind of source to the actual fire. And the hose itself, it started changing too. Early fire hoses were made from leather. And so imagine several, several feet of leather sewn or kind of riveted into a tube, and you fill that with pressurized water and you're dragging it through the street, it's gonna leak. They required so much maintenance.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:04

So after a fire, somebody had to clean it, then dry it, and then re-preserve it, and they had to try to keep that piece of equipment from rotting.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:16

So later, that came a little bit of a better improved hose, and it was the textile hose. It had rubber linings and they had uh better couplings, better nozzles. Every improvement let firefighters put more water where they actually wanted it. And then came the machine that really started making the old hand pump companies nervous. The steam

Steam Engines And Faster Apparatus

SPEAKER_01 1:07:43

fire engine. We talked in the last few minutes or so about these huge hand pumpers, like rows of firefighters working the brakes up and down and up and down. Now, it's you're creating water pressure that way just by human muscle. It worked, but it also required a substantial number of people. Now, steam could do the pumping instead, so it helped a little bit. In Cincinnati, Abel Shock and Alexander Bonner Lotta and Miles Greenwood, they developed a practical steam-powered fire engine that they kind of came up with it in the early 1850s. Their engine was delivered to Cincinnati in January 1853. And on April 1st of that year, Cincinnati established what it recognizes as the first fully paid professional fire department in the United States. Now that's according to Cincinnati government, so take it, take with it what you will. But the steam engine changed the equation. You could create very powerful, sustained water streams without having dozens of firefighters working a hand pump. But early steamers had their own kind of problems. Steam takes time. Like you need a lot of heat and pressure. The boiler has to actually create the steam. So the fire department started looking for ways to have steam ready a little bit faster. A lot of the times the stations would keep the boilers warm, and some systems were kind of designed so an engine could start building pressure as it drove down the street. So eventually you get this incredible scene of horses just racing through the streets, pulling a fire engine with smoke and sparks coming out of a smokestack behind them, and there's a bunch of firefighters trying to get enough steam pressure to start pumping as soon as they get there. So the horse-drawn, steam-powered fire engine. It's a mouthful to say. But two different technological eras kind of stuck together, and they're moving as fast as possible towards a burning building. But the city absolutely loved them. Cincinnati says that by 1863, it had replaced all of its hand engines with steamers. But fire was creating another engineering problem.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:14

Buildings were going up, literally.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:19

Like cities started to grow vertically. So your ground ladder, it's got kind of an annoying limitation. Eventually, you run out of ladder. So firefighters had used ladders for centuries at this point, but taller buildings demanded larger and more specialized apparatuses. So hook and ladder companies carried collections of ladders and hooks and axes and other tools. Extension ladders became a lot more sophisticated. But then came mechanically raised aerial ladders. And that's a whole different monster in itself. But by the 1870s, departments like Boston were starting to use aerial ladder equipment. And suddenly the fire service wasn't just developing engines, it was developing apparatus types. Like one vehicle would carry the pump and another one would carry the ladders and another carries a hose. Different companies have different jobs. So you have the engine company and the ladder company and the hose company and rescue. And that specialization is pretty much still sitting inside modern fire service language, if you think about it. Ask a firefighter whether they're assigned to the engine or the truck, and you're hearing a lot of vocab that's shaped by, I mean, technology that they developed generations ago.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:49

But there's still one part of the entire system that belonged to the ancient world, mostly.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:58

It was the horses. And eventually, even firefighters had to sit there and admit that there might be something faster. At

Motorization Ends The Horse Era

SPEAKER_01 1:12:05

the beginning of the 20th century, that's when cars were really spreading across America. Gas engines were getting better and trucks were getting stronger.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:15

And manufacturers started looking at fire at firefighters and fire engines and stuff like that. They wanted to tweak it.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:26

If an internal combustion engine can move a delivery truck, then why in the world are you still feeding oats to the fire engine? In 1906, Waterus delivered an early motorized fire apparatus to the Radner Fire Company in Wayne, Pennsylvania. Now it was a gasoline-powered unit with one engine driving the vehicle and another operating the pump. And it was the it was pretty much the beginning of the end for the horses. Not really immediately. Firefighters can be remarkably enthusiastic about innovation right up until somebody changes their equipment. It's a notable theme throughout fire and EMS and police. Departments had huge investments in horses. And the firefighters had known them and trusted them and loved them forever. And then the earlier motor vehicles, they were finicky. They broke a lot. They were complicated. The roads were really bad. They were not good at this point. Engines were pretty temperamental. But a horse, I mean, they at that point, it was locked in. They had a fairly well-established maintenance program. Food goes in, the horses just do horse stuff. So for years, like motorized and horse-drawn apparatuses existed kind of side by side because a lot of people just didn't want to let go. Some departments they converted existing steamers into actual engines, like gas-powered engines.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:05

And then they had motor tractors that would replace teams of horses.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:12

But sometimes the horses still continued pulling the older apparatuses. Like other departments bought entirely new motorized pumpers. By the 1910s and the 1920s, though, the direction was pretty obvious that the horses were leaving. Fire engineering notes that some departments continued using horse-drawn apparatuses into the mid-1920s. Even as the motorized apparatus was just spreading all over the country. And when the horses horses disappeared, the fire station changed again. Because there was no more hay, you didn't have to have stalls or harnesses. There were no giant animals living. I mean, there were they weren't there anymore. So fire trucks could leave faster, travel farther, and carry way more equipment.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:05

They could pump more water, like departments could cover a lot more a lot more area in the district.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:15

And the sound of the fire service changed. If you think about it, for centuries, emergency response had sounded like bells. And then people would be yelling, and you know, hooves and all that stuff would just be moving all over the streets. But then they decided that they'd have engines, sirens, and that that starts to look familiar to us, anyways. They'd have a motorized fire engine with red lights and a siren with hoses and ladders, and there were crews on it. So we finally reached something that a firefighter could like today could look at and immediately understand.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:55

The equipment is mainly the thing that just changed enormously.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:01

It tweaks over time. It grows and it changes. Open cabs would become enclosed, and then wooden ladders would slowly give way to stronger materials, and pumps would be way more powerful. Radios would put firefighters in contact with dispatchers and each other. So protective clothing would improve. Now they came up with the breathing apparatuses, and those would eventually let firefighters go way deeper into smoke than any other generation before them. But by the early 20th century, the basic machine was here. You had the alarm, the station would get it, firefighters would respond, and then an engine would carry them to the scene. Then you have the municipal water system that would feed the pump, and then hoses carry the water to the fire, ladders up. Different companies perform different jobs. And every technological improvement had been, I mean, they've been chasing the same enemy for a while, which was time. You want to see the fire sooner, you want to report it sooner, alert the firefighters sooner, and then get them downstairs sooner. Everything was about being faster. Because after thousands of years of fighting fire, humanity had finally learned something pretty brutally simple. You don't beat fire by being stronger than the fire. You beat it by getting there before it becomes stronger than you. There was still one enormous problem, though. Getting firefighters to the building was becoming safer and faster. Getting firefighters inside the building was not. Smoke was still smoke and heat was still heat. Buildings still collapsed. Firefighters were still breathing in whatever was in the air because there wasn't much of another option. And as the 20th century filled homes and businesses with plastics and chemicals, more synthetic materials, and then you have electricity and different kinds of fuels, it got sort of wild for them. The inside of a burning building turned into a very different place than it used to be. So the next revolution in firefighting wouldn't be about getting the engine to the fire. It would be about keeping the firefighter alive once they got off the engine.

SCBA Radios And Survival Systems

SPEAKER_01 1:18:52

I am, I guess I'm the safety guy, if you want to call it that.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:57

But I've talked to a lot of firefighters. A lot.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:59

I've worked with many of them. Um, if you talk to them long enough, you'll figure out something. That there's a moment just before a firefighter goes inside a burning building when the world gets really small. They've got their helmet on, their gloves on, they make sure their mask is sealed and their air pack is open, they've got their regulator connected, and then they take a breath. Now, they say that that first breath sounds different. It's more mechanical and it's close. And I'll say that I've worn it a couple of times. It's a very different feeling. That first breath just it becomes something, it becomes the one of the loudest things you can hear. The building might be roaring in flames in front of you, and people might be yelling, or radios are going off and engines are running. But inside that mask, you really just hear your breath. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. And then you go inside. That one moment would be almost incomprehensible to most of the firefighters we've met in this story. So the Romans didn't have breathing protection. Ben Franklin's volunteers didn't have it. And the firefighters that were just racing the horse-drawn steamers through the 19th century, they didn't have it either. I mean, pretty much all of firefighting history, smoke was just part of the fire. You dealt with it. You crawled under it or you opened windows. You stayed outside when it just became impossible. And sometimes you breathed it until you couldn't. People really experimented with smoke helmets and respirators and air hoses, all kinds of filter masks. And they just tried all kinds of breathing devices for generations. Some even looked like diving equipment. And some connected the firefighter to like an outside air supply. Some filtered the air around them, and some were some were pretty clever. Like some were probably better described as optimistic, I guess. Because but eventually, firefighters gained something that was pretty transformative for them, which is a supply of breathable air that they could carry with them. And it's called the self-contained breathing apparatus or SCBA. And it's a tank on your back. It's got a regulator and a face piece, and that air belongs to you. Like, and that changed where firefighters could go. Because smoke, it's not a it's not just uncomfortable. Like a modern fire can fill the air with all kinds of toxic gases. Combustible products, they're superheated particles. There's just it, everything wants to kill you. So modern SCBAs, they're considered fundamental protection when firefighters enter any kind of environments that are immediately dangerous to life and death. And that's according to this to the CDC. For hundreds and or thousands of years, one of fire's biggest defenses had been the atmosphere surrounding it. Like you couldn't be in it, you couldn't stay in it. And now, for a pretty limited amount of time, depending on how hard you want to breathe, you could bring your own atmosphere with you. And once firefighters could go farther inside, everything else had to get better, too. Because if you're going deeper into a burning building, it creates kind of an obvious problem. Now you have firefighters that are deeper inside a burning building. So what do you need that's going to be better? Protective equipment. You've got to progress in that. The old image of the firefighter in a long coat and like a leather helmet, that you look at that, and then it gradually kind of becomes something a lot more sophisticated. Modern turnout gear, that turned into a system. So you had the coat, the pants, boots, gloves, helmet, you had um your Nomex hood, and then you have the SCBA. They all of those layers are designed to provide protection from heat, flame, moisture, cuts, abrasions, and pretty much the whole environment that they're crawling through. But none of it makes a firefighter fireproof. That distinction is pretty important because turnout gear buys you protection and SCBA buys breathable air, but neither one can cancel out physics. Heat can still overwhelm you. Like a floor can still disappear and a roof can still come down on your head. And eventually that air pack will be empty. So that meant the modern fire service needed something firefighters centuries earlier could only have dreamed of, which was communication. Radios changed everything for these guys. Now the fire department inside could talk to somebody on the outside. So that's where you get where command can assign crews, and crews could report conditions. Somebody could call for help or dispatch could send more resources. It opened up a whole new world. There were different companies arriving from different stations, and they could help you. They could turn into one coordinated operation instead of a collection of people who just kind of happened to show up at the same time. And radios are still evolving today. Like there was a published, oh, there was a published guidance somewhere. I don't know. It was in uh August of 2026. Like it wasn't too long ago. And it was about integrating SCBA and radio accessories while making sure that firefighters don't lose critical communications inside dangerous environments. And I found that on the CDC too. Because when everything is going right, a radio can feel really bland. Like you just don't, I mean, it just doesn't feel like anything special to us. But when everything goes wrong, hearing somebody answer you may become the most important sound in the world. And if the firefighter can't answer, that problem created another piece of equipment. The pass device. Personal alert safety system. If a firefighter becomes motionless for long enough, that thing is going to scream. Like it is the if you've ever been at a fire or if you're on a fire department, you know that is the most annoying sound you will ever hear in your life. But it does its job. It is loud, it is ear-piercing. You can hear it when they're deep in a building and you're outside, you can hear it. It's not a subtle thing, but that's the point. It's essentially a firefighter wearing a machine whose entire job is to just pretty much scream, hey, I'm over here and I'm not moving. So they, according to the CDC, it's one of the most recommended devices as part of a firefighter survival system. And they've recommended it ever since it came out. When it first came out, it was groundbreaking. Now, alongside accountability and teams, they they wanted it all to work together. If the past device goes off, they want to make sure people know what to do. So that brought in accountability. That one word is another clue to just how much the job had changed at that point. Remember our volunteer companies that they were fighting? They were fighting over fires and over fire hydrants and stuff like that. Now imagine trying to operate a major fire like that. Like six engines, three trucks, maybe a rescue. Uh, you have your chief officers, you have mutual aid departments, there's dozens of firefighters everywhere. Some are inside, some are on the roof, some are searching. Uh, you got some laying out hoses, you've got some that are ventilating. There's there's all kinds of stuff. You've got some guy over there helping the energy guy turn off the power. Now, and you've got some standing by in case another firefighter gets either trapped or goes down or gets tired. Everybody is moving. Everybody is wearing similar equipment, everybody is operating around a building that is actively trying to kill them. So you need to know who is doing what, who is in charge. You need to know uh pretty much what's going on at all times. The modern

Incident Command And All-Hazards Fire

SPEAKER_01 1:27:35

incident command system, it grew partly from another recurring fire service problem. Large emergencies get a little dangerous when agencies can't talk to each other and coordinate. So, after there were some uh pretty devastating California wildfires in the early 70s, they exposed major problems with multi agency coordination. So the Fire Scope program they helped develop the system that became ICS. The idea was pretty practical. One structure that can grow with the incident. So a single engine can use it, but also a massive wildfire that involves hundreds or thousands of people can use it. And eventually ICS blew up. Like it was way beyond firefighting. It went to police, it went to EMS, it went to actual emergency management, to public works, even the federal agencies started using it, especially in disaster response. The organizational system, it was that that system that developed from the chaos of major fires became a language for managing emergencies of almost every single kind. Which feels pretty appropriate because the fire department, it was it was doing exactly the same thing. It was expanding. So remember what this job started as. It was just fire. The Romans watched for fire, and then Ben Franklin he organized all the neighbors to fight it. And entrance companies did their thing. It's a lot. A lot is we've come a long way. And then they have the communities that started looking at the fire department and realizing something. You already have people awake, and they already have trucks and they have tools, they already know how to operate in dangerous places, they already respond quickly. So they know how to organize chaos.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:33

So could you come up like could you come help with this too? A car wreck? Send the fire department. Person trapped, fire department. Gas leak, fire department. Power lines down, fire department. Any hazmat, fire department. Flooding, fire department. You get what I'm saying here. Elevator rescue, fire department.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:56

Tree on a house, fire department. Cat in a tree. Okay, okay, sometimes. And eventually, in many communities, medical emergencies, a lot of medical emergencies, actually. The numbers are kind of ridiculous. According to the U.S. Fire Administration's early data from 2026 from the new National Emergency Response Information System, about 62% of reported fire department runs required EMS.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:28

62% of fire department runs required EMS. There were calls involving an actual fire. Four percent.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:42

Which means the modern American fire department has reached a ridiculously strange point in its evolution. The thing that's printed on the building is no longer the thing it does the most. And I want to be careful here because our next the next entire episode is EMS. And if there's one branch of emergency services that has truly inherited society's habit of saying, I have no idea what to do with this person, so call somebody, EMS deserves its own chapter of that story. Actually, EMS deserves seven chapters, and it's it's it's it's gonna get them. But the overlap tells us something important about fire departments. They became pretty much all hazards organization. Not everywhere in exactly the same way. Fire departments in America are incredibly different. Like some provide transport EMS, and some they just do first response only. Some do no medical service at all. I mean, it's it's wild. Some of them have technical rescue teams, some have hazmat teams, some it just kind of depend on, they depend on regional teams. It's wild. Some have 10 stations and hundreds of career firefighters, and some have one station with one engine and like three volunteers.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:02

It's it's so different everywhere. There's no single American fire department, and yet it's recognizable almost everywhere.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:17

The station and the engine and the gear, the people who leave when the alarm goes off, like all of that. Even the technology that would look like magic to Ben Franklin has become pretty ordinary to us. Now they have thermal imaging cameras that allow firefighters to detect heat patterns where your human eyeballs would see pretty much nothing. Inside thick smoke, a firefighter can scan a room and find the outline of a person. They can find hidden heat, uh, follow changing conditions, look for fire traveling through parts of a building that you really can't see, that they look untouched from the outside. Now, radios connect the crew to command, and SCBAs provide air, the pass alarms watch for motion, and the modern pumps can move huge amounts of water. Aerial apparatuses can reach several stories into the air at this point. Like a lot. Some of those ladders are ridiculous. Now they have hydraulic rescue tools that can just rip vehicles to shreds, they can get anywhere for anything. They have all kinds of specialized teams that can repel from structures. It's really cool. But meanwhile, somewhere in America right now, there's a firefighter probably changing the battery in a smoke detector for somebody who couldn't reach the ceiling. And that's pretty much the best summary of the modern fire service. It became extraordinarily sophisticated without losing the simple reason it's there. Somebody needs help, they go. That's the thread running through this entire story is Rome, they put their guys up because somebody needed to be awake when everyone else was sleeping. London learned that fire protection couldn't depend entirely on whoever happened to be available. The insurance companies discovered that organized firefighters could reduce losses and save them money. American volunteers decided their neighbors shouldn't face fires alone. It's pretty wild. You had all that stuff up here, the technology changed, air packs, all that stuff. The strangest thing about firefighters, I mean, is the direction they go, I guess, straight into a fire. Think about almost every instinct that your body has whenever you encounter fire. Heat automatically makes you want to move away. Smoke makes you move away. The sound of a building coming apart will make you move away. Everybody inside is trying to get outside. And then a truck carrying a bunch of people just shows up, and their job description literally requires them to go the opposite direction. And it's not because they're immune to fear. Training exists specifically because just charging blindly into danger is a pretty efficient way to create additional victims. Modern firefighting is built around risk assessment. So you assess the conditions, the construction, the behavior of the fire, and resources that are available to you, and survivability. You have to know when to go in and know when to get out. And knowing that sometimes the correct firefighting decision is to stand outside and put water on what is already lost. Because somewhere along the path from buckets to SCBAs, another idea kind of showed up too. The firefighter has to go home. That sounds pretty obvious, but historically, it wasn't always treated that way. The fire service has had to learn repeatedly and pretty painfully that tradition cannot outrank physics. That equipment has limits. The buildings change, the smoke, it changes when the materials inside the buildings change. And you do have a lot of cancers that can appear years after the fire is over. There's all kinds of cardiac events that can kill firefighters who never they never really became trapped inside the fire or had any trouble inside the building. They just went into cardiac arrest. It happens. There's all kinds of mental health injuries that can follow people back to the station. And there's a lot of things that firefighters breathe and absorb and witness and carry and remember. And in like almost every improvement we've talked about in this episode, a lot of those lessons came after somebody got hurt or somebody died. And that is one uncomfortable truth hiding inside the history of firefighting. It's a a lot of progress was made based on disaster. So, like when a city would burn, they would change the building codes. Firefighters would die, and then they would change equipment. If a roof collapsed, they would change training, or if communications would fail, they would change procedures. There's a lot of change that happens after bad things happen. Like it's that's just kind of the way the world works.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:30

You don't know what you don't know until something happens. And that's I mean, that's probably the best place to leave the main story.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:42

Because we started a while ago, like thousands of years ago, with people standing between a fire and something they owned. And they were holding buckets, there were no air packs or engines or any of that. And then somebody organized them, and then they invented the pump and built the station and they ran wires through the city. All of that happened. Somebody always figured out the next step. Generation after generation would get better until we ended up here, which is the modern fire department. And we're still waiting and still watching and still leaving when something goes wrong. And somehow, after everything we've covered, we have really barely touched the weird stuff. Because over a thousand years of organized firefighting really leaves behind some pretty incredible stories. Firefighters have used equipment that looks completely insane by modern standards. Firehouses have traditions with origins almost nobody even remembers anymore. And there are reasons fire engines are red. Except that story is a lot messier than the one you've probably been told. There's a reason the Dalmatians became associated with firehouses in the first place. And there have been fires that were so strange that they changed cities and laws, buildings, and entire industries, actually. And some of the most famous things everybody knows, quote unquote, about firefighting aren't actually even true. So before we close the book on fire, we have a few things left to talk about. And some of them are ridiculous, which means it's time to go into that's wild. So this is one of the longest episodes that we've done yet, and I still feel like there's a lot to cover. But we've got the general idea of everything. We've got the good history of firefighting. But we've gone from Roman watchmen to buckets, insurance companies, volunteers, horses, and steam engines, SCBAs and thermal cameras, and all the modern fire department things that somehow get us back and forth and responding to almost everything. But uh thousands of years of firefighting, it leaves behind some stuff that doesn't really fit anywhere else. Some of it is kind of weird, some of it is brilliant, and some of it is downright terrifying. And may raise the very reasonable question who looked at that and thought, yeah, that'll work. So it's time for that's wild. Personally,

That's Wild Firefighting Stories

SPEAKER_01 1:40:39

my favorite part of every episode, and we're gonna start it out with the dog. Because there is an actual reason that Dalmatians became firehouse dogs. And no, it isn't because their spots look good next to the red truck. Their relationship started before there were fire trucks. Dalmatians were carriage dogs, and they were athletic enough to really run alongside horse-drawn carriages for a long time for long distances, and they developed a reputation for working extremely well around horses. So when fire engines were pulled by horses, Dalmatians fit right in. They could run alongside the apparatus, and some ran ahead to help clear the street as the horses came through. At the fire scene, the dogs could stay around the horses and kind of help guard them and keep the horses as calm as possible in the middle of a bunch of smoke and noise and crowds. And that's I mean, according to the American Kennel Club, that was the way that Dalmatians were originally used. And then the motorized fire engine arrived. So after that, the horses were gone, but the Dalmatian stuck around. The firefighters really did keep the Dalmatians around, and it was more of a and a working dog that had been originally it was there because of the horses, sort of became associated with the fire department permanently. They got rid of the entire transportation system that created the tradition, anyways, but they kept the dog.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:10

That's wild. So next one.

SPEAKER_01 1:42:15

And before the modern fire extinguisher really became common, you could buy something called it was um it's called a fire grenade. And yeah, it's exactly what it sounds like. It's a glass ball and it's filled with fire extinguishing liquid. So if you discovered a fire and you grab that glass grenade, you would throw it into the fire. The glass would shatter and it would release the liquid over the flames. Now, early versions could contain salt water, and then later versions, they sometimes contained a chemical car called um carbon tetrachloride. Tech that tetrachloride. I don't know why I can't talk today. And that, I mean, it was essentially it was considerably more effective at suppressing fire. And there was just one tiny problem, though, is that the tetrachloride it's kind of toxic. And when you're exposed to high heat with that, it can produce extremely dangerous gases, including phosgene. And you may recognize the name because phosgene was used as a chemical weapon during World War I. So imagine this: if your kitchen would catch on fire, you could grab the safety device and you throw it into the flames. It breaks, and the fire might go out, but now we have a whole different emergency. That's wild. Now, let's talk about something you've probably seen in cartoons.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:49

Somebody is trapped several stories above the street level, and the firefighters kind of gather below them and they stretch out this big giant circular net, like a or trampoline, and they yell jump. That was real. They were called life nets.

SPEAKER_01 1:44:09

And one well-known version was the Browder Life Safety Net. And it was developed in the late 19th century. A group of firefighters would hold the device below a window, and pretty much somebody trapped inside would literally jump from the building and try to land in it. It worked under the right conditions. Like people did survive jumps that otherwise would have killed them. But under the right conditions is doing a lot of work in that sentence because the person had to hit the net. And you would think that was the general idea. Now, the height couldn't be too extreme either. And the falling person, they would still hit the net with enormous force. And everybody standing underneath them had to absorb that force. Firefighters generally considered the practical range somewhere around several stories. No exact. Although there are documented cases of people surviving much, much higher jumps. Eventually, the aerial ladder and better building safety, they really improved rescue techniques and the other like other technologies kind of pushed life nets out of the way. But for decades, one of the legitimate strategies for rescuing somebody from a burning building was we're just gonna stand here and you're gonna jump.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:37

That's wild. Now, Mrs. O'Leary's cow. And you probably know this one.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:47

In October of 1871, in Chicago, Catherine O'Leary, she went into the barn, and she's milking a cow, and the cow kicks over a lantern. The barn catches on fire, and then boom, the Great Chicago fire. Except, we don't actually know what started the Great Chicago fire. Now the fire did begin around the O'Leary property, but the investigation never established that Catherine O'Leary and her cow were the cause. Now the famous cow story, it sort of it blew up after that. While Catherine, who was an Irish immigrant, she was subjected to some pretty ugly stereotypes and harassment in the press, and that's from the National Archives. The story stuck so well that more than a hundred years later, in 1997, the Chicago City Council formally passed a resolution exonerating Catherine O'Leary and the cow. Which means somewhere in the legislative history of one of America's largest cities, the cow is innocent, and the actual cause remains unknown.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:04

That's wild. Now let's go to San Francisco.

SPEAKER_01 1:47:09

In April of 1906, I think it was April 18th, at 5 o'clock in the morning, one of the most destructive earthquakes in American history hits the city. So buildings are collapsing and gas lines are breaking, fires are breaking out everywhere. And then firefighters discover another nightmare. The earthquake has damaged the water system. Hydrants that should have been supplying water did not. So the fire spread across the city while crews were just trying to find water anywhere that they could get it. But in the mission district, firefighters found a hydrant near 20th and Church Street, I think is what it was, that still had water. Now crews were able to use that supply as part of the fight that stopped the flames from advancing farther into the neighborhood. Contemporary fire department reports, they kind of describe it that the hydrant and the nearby cisterns providing critical water, while much of the surrounding system had failed. So they said that one was producing water. Now the hydrant itself became famous, and today it's known as the golden fire hydrant. And it's literally painted gold. For generations, people from San Francisco have commemorated the earthquake and the fire by repainting it. Just one hydrant sitting on a street corner. Because in 1906, when an entire city was just out of water, there was one fire hydrant that was still working. So every year they make sure that people know they make sure it's taken care of.

SPEAKER_00 1:48:50

And it's repainted gold every year. That's wild.

SPEAKER_01 1:48:56

And I've got one more for you. Because somewhere somebody looked at a wildfire burning miles from the nearest road, and apparently they thought, you know what would make firefighting easier? Parachuting into it. This is where we come into smoke jumpers. And they are highly trained wildland firefighters who they fly over remote fires, but they jump out of an airplane with a parachute. So the idea it was pretty experimental. It started in the late 1930s. And on July 12th, 1940, Rufus Robinson and Earl Cooley made the first operational fire jump in the Nez Perce National Forest. Now think about the problem that they were trying to solve. There was a lightning strike that starts a fire way like just deep into the mountain wilderness. And there are no roads. So if you wanted to hike out there, like if you were gonna send The crew hiking out there, it might take hours. By the time they get there, a small fire could have just turned into a huge monster.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:10

And an airplane can get there pretty quick. So the firefighters in the airplane kind of solve that problem. They would remove the part where the airplane lands.

SPEAKER_01 1:50:23

Like that's that's the part where it gets kind of wild. Modern smoke jumpers, they still exist. Yes, they do. They can parachute into rugged country carrying heavy equipment and they can work the fire. They can get additional tools and supplies by airdrop. And then sometimes they still have to hike these huge loads back out after it's over. Now, the National Interagency Fire Center says that smoke jumpers may jump carrying around 90 pounds of gear. And then later they have to pack more than 120 pounds of equipment through rough terrain. Which means that there are firefighters whose commute to work is getting on an airplane, jumping out of it with a parachute, and then hiking through the forest to fight a fire.

SPEAKER_00 1:51:17

And then you have to walk back out with however much gear you have. That's wild. Wait, actually, I lied. One more. So, why are fire trucks red?

SPEAKER_01 1:51:32

And surely, after everything that we've learned, we should at least know that, right? Now we have theories, and we have lots of theories. One says that volunteer companies competed with each other, and one of them used expensive red paint as a point of pride. But another rumor says that red helped the apparatus stand out. There's another popular story that says when uh automobiles, most of them were black, like it was a really common color. Departments chose red so the fire engines would be more visible against other cars in traffic. And there are symbolic explanations involving fire itself, you know, red for fire and all that. There's even stories about the cost of pigments, like red was cheaper to do back then. And there are departments that will absolutely tell you the version that they heard is the correct one. But the historical record doesn't really give us one universally accepted response. In fact, fire service historians have found red apparatuses existing before cars even showed up, which creates a pretty serious problem for that everything else was black because of Henry Ford explanation. So after thousands of years of firefighting and Rome and Ben Franklin and all that stuff, we still can't really answer one of the questions, probably the main question any five-year-old is probably going to ask you, why is the fire truck red? And the answer is we don't completely know. And somehow, that's probably my favorite fact because history is like that. We inherit things like traditions and symbols and words, little habits that we repeated for so many generations that eventually nobody even remembers what started them in the first place. So the fire the fire service is just completely full of these things. Some of them exist because once they did solve a real problem, the D the Dalmatian did have a job, and the poles they would save you like five to ten seconds, and the alarm bells would carry information, all that. But then the world changed and pieces of the old world kind of stuck around, which is probably why a fire station can contain some of the most advanced emergency technology humans have ever built. But it still sits under that Maltese cross, or beside an old brass bell, or some of them have Dalmatians painted on the wall. You have all of these years of history, but they all share the same like the same bay. The same bay that held horses now holds these ridiculously overcomplicated fire engines, and that brings us to one last question.

The Promise Behind The Firehouse

SPEAKER_01 1:54:29

Because after all of the history and the equipment and the traditions and disasters, and the absolutely just bizarre things that we invented to fire fire, what exactly is the fire department now? And maybe more importantly, why does it still matter so much that somebody is still sitting at that station waiting on a phone to ring? We've already seen that. They became rescue and hazmat, disaster response, technical rescue, uh, even medical response. Whatever the community needed, pretty much pretty bad at that moment, somebody had to show up. But underneath all of that, there's something even more simple: a promise. Now, most of us live our entire lives assuming that if something terrible happens, somebody will show up. We don't think about how strange that is. Because if your house catches on fire at three in the morning, somebody shows up. Or if your car rolls into a ditch, somebody comes. There's what if there's smoke just pouring out of your attic? Somebody's gonna show up. You can be having the worst day of your life. And somewhere nearby, a room full of people might be just hanging out at the base and eating dinner, watching TV or cleaning equipment or just sleeping. Maybe they're even arguing about something completely pointless. And then the phone rings and suddenly your your emergency becomes their emergency too. And that idea is so normal to us that we barely notice it, but it took thousands of years to build. For most of history, if your house caught fire, the people coming to help were the people who just happen to be close enough to see the smoke. And then we started organizing and doing all of that with ancient Rome, and everything just progressed from there. All of it is built around the same basic decision. We don't wait until disaster happens to figure out who is going to help. We decide that ahead of time. And maybe that's what a fire department really is. It's not the engines or stations or helmets or any of that. It's pretty much the community itself deciding in advance that when somebody's in trouble, somebody has to go. And that doesn't mean the fire service is perfect. It's not. It has traditions worth keeping, traditions worth really questioning. I mean, it still has its own problems it's trying to solve. Now, we understand the risk a lot better now than we did 20 years ago, but there's still some that we don't understand enough. And like everything else we've talked about in this episode, it keeps changing. Like the more the buildings change and technology changes, every it changes constantly. So, I mean, but the call still means the same thing. You still get the call and you still go. Essentially, they just call. Somebody needs something, and then you go find out what it is. And there's something really fascinating about the about the fact that the modern fire service contains both ends of its own history. Like a firefighter today can stand beside a computer, um, like a digital fire truck. The controls are digital, and then some are still analog. But it carries all this stuff in it, like all the hydraulic rescue tools and the breathing equipment, all of that, but they can still pick up an axe or a stick with, you know, anything attached to it.

SPEAKER_00 1:58:17

Because maybe that's why fire departments feel old even when everything inside them is new.

SPEAKER_01 1:58:26

It's very strange to go into a fire department. You see things that are hundreds of years old, and then you see things that are a week old. It's just a really strange thing to think about. Like in the 19th century cities, the horses would stand waiting on firehouses because every second mattered. But somebody had to get there. So part one of our three-part journey through emergency services has come to an end.

EMS Next Time And Goodbye

SPEAKER_01 1:58:53

That's fire. And next time, we're moving to something much younger. Because organized firefighting, it can trace recognizable versions of itself back thousands of years. Now, modern emergency medical services, not even close. The idea that somebody could call for medical help, and instead of simply being carried to a hospital, that trained people would come to them and they would bring medicine into their house and start, maybe start treatment in the seat in the street, or manage an airway in the back of a moving vehicle. Maybe they could shock your heart, they could give medications, and sometimes they could just begin delivering hospital-level interventions before the hospital is even visible. That idea is ridiculously recent. For a long time, an ambulance was just exactly what the word suggested. It was transportation. That's it. It was get the injured person off the battlefield or out of the street or wherever, and then just get them somewhere that medicine really would happen. The medicine wasn't supposed to come to you, and then something changed. Well, actually, a lot of things changed. Wars and car crashes, and you know, a lot of cardiac research and CPR, defibrillators, hospitals and civil rights. And it took a lot of doctors willing to try something new, but communities they needed to be willing to build systems that nobody had built before. And we've already seen that with the fire service. So people would look at patients dying between wherever they are, wherever they're picked up from, and the hospital. And then they started asking a really dangerous question, I guess. Like, why are we waiting? Why does treatment have to start at the hospital? Why can't we bring the hospital to the patient? And that question would just create one of the strangest jobs in emergency services because somewhere along the way, an ambulance stopped being just a ride, and the people inside it stopped being just drivers. They became actual clinicians. And then communities discovered something else. If you create a number people can call when somebody needs medical help, they will call it for literally everything. Heart attacks, car wrecks, the overdose, the stroke, the fall, any psych crisis, or the person who can't breathe, or just the person who's scared, or the person who's homeless, or the person who's lonely. Most of those people, a lot of those people may not even need a hospital at all. But they need somebody. But EMS kind of became something that nobody completely planned. It was a healthcare system, also an emergency system, also a transportation system, and also a public safety service. And in many communities, the place where every problem that doesn't quite fit anywhere, it eventually lands on EMS. Which is why part two is going to need its own episode. Because the history of EMS isn't just the history of the ambulance. It's the story of how medicine escaped the hospital. It's how a vehicle meant to move patients sort of turned into a tiny ER on wheels. And how the people riding in the back of it sort of they became responsible for some of the most wild, intimate, heartbreaking, ridiculous, and important moments in another person's life. We started this series with fire with the people who go toward the flames. Next time we're going to follow the ambulance. And somehow that story may be even stranger. I'm Andrew Perry. This has been ADHD in the theory of all the things. And until next time, don't be afraid to follow the rabbit hole.

SPEAKER_00 2:03:03

We're going to visit EMS next time.