151–160 of 341 posts
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They can pay for it. They just don't want to increase taxes.
The tax base just isn't there sometimes. I've seen community budgets where everyone is hanging on by a thread. Not quite as bad as Native American reservations, but up there.
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> one can't help but suspect that sheer tradition is a somewhat significant factor Only if you didn't read the article. "There's a city-specific reason why San Francisco has stuck with wood rather than swap over to metals, and the answer lies in looking up. The high-voltage cables and wires that guide the city's (oft-maligned) public transport system Muni, and trolley cars crisscross above nearly every street, mean t…
It doesn't explain why they couldn't just buy wooden or fiberglass ladders though. I'm sure there are many vendors who would be happy to fill such a contract.
I can't think of any reason to acclimatize them this way instead of kiln drying/vaporizing them (depending) to roughly the right moisture content and waiting for 1% change (instead of kiln drying them to 0, or waiting forever for completely green wood) There are studies going back to the 70's by the forestry service (and others) showing there is no change in mechanical properties of pine/fir from these drying schedul…
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a retired police officer once told me that the quantity of officers citywide goes through a repeated cycle from low to high to low again. when the number of officers is too low and there's too much crime, the people demand that the government hire more. so government does that. and crime goes down. then the public notices all these police officers "doing nothing" and complains about wasted government resources. so, n…
This is a common phenomena, and I'm not sure if there's a general term for it. E.g. people prematurely stop taking antibiotics because they feel better, or people go off their meds because they feel fine, etc.
But in the antibiotics example, it's the other way around. The results are ignored in spite of the cause ("I feel better, therefore I'm done"). That one could also just be regular old ignorance, but that's a boring topic of discussion.
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Fiberglass is reinforced plastic, though, so that might explain why it isn't used in FDs even if it's heavily used in other domains. How well does it hold up to heat? How does that exposure effect it structural properties? I honestly don't know and don't have time to look it up, but I could see thermal plastic deformation over such a long run as potentially hazardous.
Could be. I know film shoots can end up occurring in all kinds of weather (especially here in Canada), and often the ladders will be sidled up to large sun lamps (which I can assure you get very hot), and in electrically-compromising situations, but all of those are very different from an actual fire.
edit: http://tkolb.net/safety/LadderSafety/LadderSafety.html ... can't vouch for site but interesting.
I can't think of any reason to acclimatize them this way instead of kiln drying/vaporizing them (depending) to roughly the right moisture content and waiting for 1% change (instead of kiln drying them to 0, or waiting forever for completely green wood) There are studies going back to the 70's by the forestry service (and others) showing there is no change in mechanical properties of pine/fir from these drying schedul…
I bet the expert woodmakers doing this job have very good reasons. Reasons that you haven't thought of..
Seriously, these people are experts. They probably know their job, really, really well.
> There's a city-specific reason why San Francisco has stuck with wood rather than swap over to metals, and the answer lies in looking up. The high-voltage cables and wires that guide the city's (oft-maligned) public transport system Muni, and trolley cars crisscross above nearly every street, mean that ladders made of conductive elements are generally just too dangerous to use. I wonder how it's done in European cit…
Fiberglass, probably. Which is what SF should be doing.
Here lies a pretty cool article about a pretty cool practice demonstrating how the SFFD maintains their own equipment, to their own specifications (rather than an approximation thereof), and for less money than simply farming it out to a vendor. There might even be an applicable (to HN) lesson here on the value of employing an in-house toolmaker, whatever your profession may be.
And then there's this lot here in the comments that is completely in arms against it because le Hackernews is obviously an expert Fire Brigade, or just has an allergic reaction to civilian government agencies maintaining their own equipment versus joining the throwaway consumerist cult the rest of world has acquiesced to.
Americans seem to take a lot of pride in their fire brigades - their fire engines are still shiny and polished with more traditional signage and the fire fighters still wear helmets with their traditional shape. In the United Kingdom they wear more simple uniforms and the engines are just a box shape with no bells any more - seems a shame. Usually it's UK the has more ceremony in these kind of things.
In North America streets are designed to fit emergency vehicles. You're not allowed to build a street so narrow that a fire engine couldn't turn around there, for example.
If you get a chance to visit a Smokejumper base, I highly recommend it. One of the things you learn is that everyone on the team is required to make all of their own equipment by hand. So all of these highly trained, ex-military guys spend days on end doing nothing but sewing clothes and packing parachutes. The reasons described: - Cheaper than contracting out everything - They have a better idea of the exact specifi…
But a side result is that you have a chance of actually understanding how your tools work, which is beneficial when developing new tools or when the tools stop working.