A car may have plowed into a crowd on Bourbon Street early on Wednesday, the New Orleans Police Department reported, according to ABC News affiliate WGNO.
Fire departments need to quit insisting on buying the most massive trucks they can possibly find in every situation. Places outside the US get by just fine with much smaller fire trucks than we use (especially for lower density / low-rise areas). We’ve got to quit turning our residential streets into freeways by building them so wide, and the trucks’ bulk and turning radius needs to stop being an excuse.
If you build high buildings, you need more ladder as a rule of thumb. You can either have more stations, some with smaller gear, or you can economically consolidate.
At this point they’re often doing more harm (in terms of wide streets with channelized intersections making pedestrians less safe from traffic) than good (in terms of providing truck access in the event of a fire), especially for stations serving single-family neighborhoods.
They need to pay the slight extra cost to have different kinds of appropriate equipment for different areas; it’s worth it. It doesn’t happen because the fire department isn’t considering the traffic effects and nobody’s really looking at the big picture.
Fire departments need to quit insisting on buying the most massive trucks they can possibly find in every situation. Places outside the US get by just fine with much smaller fire trucks than we use (especially for lower density / low-rise areas). We’ve got to quit turning our residential streets into freeways by building them so wide, and the trucks’ bulk and turning radius needs to stop being an excuse.
If you build high buildings, you need more ladder as a rule of thumb. You can either have more stations, some with smaller gear, or you can economically consolidate.
These two fire trucks have pretty much the same ladder length, despite one truck being nearly twice as long:
The wheels are presumably similar sized by the way.
At this point they’re often doing more harm (in terms of wide streets with channelized intersections making pedestrians less safe from traffic) than good (in terms of providing truck access in the event of a fire), especially for stations serving single-family neighborhoods.
They need to pay the slight extra cost to have different kinds of appropriate equipment for different areas; it’s worth it. It doesn’t happen because the fire department isn’t considering the traffic effects and nobody’s really looking at the big picture.