The Iron Yuppie

Gothamist: Burning Bed Kills Queens Man

Not funny, but very interesting from a resource allocation perspective. A man was burned to death under a burning mattress and the fire engine took 7 minutes to get there. Is that a long time? According to this "Firefighters, Chiefs Respond to Survey on Boston Globe Series - (Firehouse.com News)" the NFPA guidelines are that fire departments must be able to reach 90% of building fires in 6 minutes, only 35% of which actually met the goal in 2002. Ok, so let's say the firehouse that closed down could get the time back to 6 minutes. You could put a firehouse on every street corner and get the time to 1 minute... does that improve the average welfare of your city? It's a bit like planning for the next Tsunami or Meteor... sure you can do it, but it'll cost you and it'll likely have a very rare payoff. The second Mr. Bloomberg started closing firehouses to save money and put that money into other causes, you knew something like this was going to happen at least once. Note, bring this note up when my condo is burning to the ground because the fire engine got to my house in 8 minutes instead of 6.