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The San Franciso Fire Department makes its own wooden ladders by hand

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Re: The San Franciso Fire Department makes its own wooden ladders by hand

#271

Post by analog31 »

zrobotics wrote: post #165
analog31 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A related anecdote: There was for a long time, a history of students in certain disciplines such as physics and some areas of chemistry, making their own tools and equipment. My dad had to build an NMR as part of an analytical chemistry course. I built an exceptional amount of gear for my graduate research project. Of course there's the bit about using cheap labor. But a side result is that you have a chance of actua…

That might have more to do with 1)students being cheap & 2)researchers often needing custom equipment that is unavaliable commercially. I know the justification given for undergrad chemists learning glassworking was the expectation that as professionals it would be a required skill.

It was for my dad. He was doing vacuum line work, so he pretty much had to do his own glasswork, because his requirements would change from one experiment to the next. Same as why a lot of scientists do their own programming.

In my own case it was because instrumentation was the thing that I was ultimately interested in, and the expertise that I developed in grad school got me going in my career. The stuff that I built was on top of the roughly half million dollars worth of commercial equipment that I used.

Re: The San Franciso Fire Department makes its own wooden ladders by hand

#272

Post by tolk460 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #265
firemancoder wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true, especially in big city departments. Sure there are days when you run 3 or 4 calls and you get a lot of downtime, but most departments run 3000 or more calls a year. Do the math. But yeah utilizing their downtime is smart. And you're gonna build a damn good ladder and not cut corners if you know you're going to be standing on it.

> Sure there are days when you run 3 or 4 calls and you get a lot of downtime, but most departments run 3000 or more calls a year. 3000 calls a year is about 8 calls a day. Assuming the 3000 calls/year is per station, and not per dwpartment, that means a station responds to a call, on average, once every three hours.

Also factor in most of those calls during the morning and evening, follow-up paperwork time, daily equipment checks, and station maintenance. If you cut the timeframe down to 12 hours busy window, that's 90 minutes per call. Throw a good call in there and they stack up. In my experience, a 24 hour shift with 8-10 calls is just about the max to handle before burnout.

Re: The San Franciso Fire Department makes its own wooden ladders by hand

#273

Post by robszumski »

AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #219
curun1r wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL at SFFD giving any shits about costs. This is the same department that power grabbed emergency medical response away from dedicated paramedics in ambulances. Responding in full ladder trucks to take care of drunk homeless people...yeah, they do that, costing millions every year in added expenses and road repairs. But good for them for saving a few bucks on ladders, that must make a huge difference.

Coming from NYC, it is somewhat surprising to see such anger directed at fire departments. Here, the FDNY seems universally loved.

There was that time an _on-duty_ firefighter was drunk driving the rig, hit a motorcyclist and everyone involved tried to cover it up, including fleeing the scene. He didn't get questioned by the police for hours.

https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Former-SF-firefighter-g...

Re: The San Franciso Fire Department makes its own wooden ladders by hand

#274

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

zrobotics wrote: post #269
reaperducer wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They're nonconductive fiberglass They're also not being used right next to flames. Yes, fiberglass can be made that won't buckle under both weight and heat, but not at the same price point as wood.

Because wood reacts so well to fires?

Oddly, yes. Sufficiently dense wood takes a lot to ignite and burns quite slowly, and I assume they coated it to make it even harder to get started.

Re: The San Franciso Fire Department makes its own wooden ladders by hand

#275

Post by megaman22 »

craftyguy wrote: post #29
enriquto wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a job where 95% of the time is spent waiting for an emergency to react to. this describes quite accurately the work of many people maintaining computer systems

I must be maintaining the wrong systems, because over here 95% of the time is reacting to emergencies (some technical, but most fabricated by management)

I've spent a couple hours every morning the last eight Tuesdays explaining to a customer that the software that they purchased from us, and installed on their servers, goes down for a few minutes at 1:00 AM because their server team is rebooting those servers to apply updates. Every week, same time, same issue, same cause, same review and root cause analysis demanded. Fixing broken processes in broken companies is 1000 times harder than anything else in software.

Re: The San Franciso Fire Department makes its own wooden ladders by hand

#277

Post by azernik »

BurningFrog wrote: post #13
legitster wrote: post #2

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…

It makes sense for a job where 95% of the time is spent waiting for an emergency to react to .

There's a similar phenomenon in the military - a lot of any soldier's time is spent maintaining their gear, moving/packing supplies, etc.

Re: The San Franciso Fire Department makes its own wooden ladders by hand

#278

Post by grkvlt »

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #248
chrisseaton wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does the fire department respond to a medical emergency?

They do in most countries actually. There's a lot of similarity in the skills you need.

Don't most countries have a separate ambulance/paramedic service for medical emergencies? Certainly in the UK we have fire, police and ambulance as the three emergency services, one (or more) of which will be sent by the dispatcher following a 999 emergency call. I think most commonwealth countries are the same.

Re: The San Franciso Fire Department makes its own wooden ladders by hand

#279

Post by function_seven »

tw04 wrote: post #270
mdorazio wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this. Fiberglass is non-conductive, so that's not really a reason to not use non-wood ladders. It is also generally stronger and more durable for the same weight.

Every fiber glass ladder I've seen has aluminum caps at both ends and aluminum steps.

As long as those steps and caps are connected with fiberglass sides, what’s the issue?

Re: The San Franciso Fire Department makes its own wooden ladders by hand

#280

Post by nkurz »

freehunter wrote: post #212
pastor_elm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Most firefighters in the US are volunteer, so not enough pride to pay people to do it. In big cities, it's more of an internal camaraderie thing. They live together, cook together, shop together, etc. A lot prefer being at the station with their 'brothers' to being at home.

Volunteer firemen in the US certainly do get paid, or at least reimbursed. They're not working for free. And places with volunteer fire departments aren't volunteer because there's no pride, they're volunteer because there aren't enough fires to warrant paying people full-time to sit around doing nothing. They're on-call, and they get paid to respond to fires. In the meantime, they go to their normal job that also pa…

I think you are overgeneralizing. In the two places I'm familiar with, rural North Carolina and rural Wisconsin, "volunteer firemen" are truly unpaid volunteers. You are right that others are paid for their time, but it's not universal. Here's a Straight Dope thread that talks about the different approaches in some different places: https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=658416
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