> We're facing the issue in Ontario where firefighters are bored out of their minds and are being used as first responders for anything and everything. They show up to random fender benders.

There are a few reasons for this, and none of them are that the firefighters are bored.

The first reason, probably more relevant in Ontario, is just a matter of practicality. If an injury is reported in an accident, the assumption is that a person needs medical attention. Emergency services can't really make an assessment of a scene without being on site, so both are sent in case there needs to be some kind of fire suppression or an extraction to reach the person. Simply, we don't want an ambulance to arrive at an accident, realize on-site that the jaws of life are needed before they can help, wait for another response time, and then render care. The potential to save a life takes precedence over raw efficiency.

(A quick side note about assessing a scene: if you're just driving by, it's basically impossible to tell how bad an injury might be in an accident. Modern cars are very safe, but if someone wasn't wearing their seatbelt and had their head in the wrong place when an airbag went off, even a fender bender can be a life-threatening situation.)

The second, at least in the US, is that ambulances are not considered essential emergency services in many communities[0]. This means that they don't get the same level of funding and are not subject to the same response time requirements as the fire department. Emergency medical services might be covered by a hodgepodge of private companies and volunteer efforts[1], so this also means that public services, such as the fire department, often have to fill in the gaps[1]. Especially in rural areas, ample ambulance coverage just isn't profitable to the private companies that operate the service, so response times can be close to half an hour.

[0] - https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2023/06/26/no-amb...

[1] - https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2018/08/the-problem-of-p...

They are also often out there narcaning people when paramedics are not available (which I am sure they are not super pumped about).

Honestly I am not really upset about that. Train them to support the community in other ways while they hang out waiting for a fire. People are always raging that police cant handle mental health incidents, train them for that (heh I am sure firefighters would not be pumped about that but you get the idea).

Ha, in the US but I had an issue with my chimney where there a strong smoke smell in the basement and an inexplicable hot spot on the back of my fireplace (no fire had been lit recently, and what creosote there was wasn't ignited). Not knowing what else to do, I called the fire deparment's non-emergency line and explained the situation.

They sent THREE full fire engines with sirens blaring and like 30 guys in full gear to my house, chief came out too. All to smash out the back of the fireplace and dispose of some smoldering embers that had collected behind it.

Seemed like an overreaction, now I'm wondering if they were just bored and decided to use me as a training exercise. Granted I'm also just some goober on the phone, they're under no obligation to assume I've reasonably assessed the situation.

Re the "fire": Turns out the original builders of my chimney skimped on bricks, and left a gap between the back of the fireplace and the exterior wall that shouldn't have been there. We were using the fireplace on the weekends, so some embers that cooled on their way up the chimney and fell back down collected in the gap, and decided to cook off a couple of days later. Weather was getting warmer, so instead of going up the chimney the resulting smoke down-drafted back into the house.

>We don't really need multiple exits in case of fire because fires are occurring less often and people are getting plenty of warning.

I'm not a fire expert but I don't think that logic holds. The point is redundancy. If one exit gets blocked, you have another one you can use. Hospitals don't stop carrying backup power supply for life-saving equipment just because "the power grid downtime has improved."

Yet people still die in apartment building fires, usually because they panic when there is a fire in another apartment, leave their apartment, and suffocate to the smoke. And then there are cases where the regulation has failed / not been followed, and the whole building burns down despite best efforts from firefighters.

I've seen all these things happen, even though I live in EU country with strict regulations. I sure sleep better knowing that my apartment has entrance directly to outdoor corridor, and a ladder I can climb down from my balcony if the corridor is somehow blocked. I would never move into a modern apartment building where only escape is through indoor corridors.

> We don't really need multiple exits in case of fire because fires are occurring less often and people are getting plenty of warning.

Based on the video, external fire exits were a bad idea from the start and were recommended against 150 years ago, but inertia is hard to overcome.

(unless I Completely misunderstood)

Cheap li-ion e-scooters and bikes are here to turn all these advancements back.

Them being bored is generally a good thing because it means the area is fairly safe, but that will tank their motivation I suppose.

I did call them once though - a post box was smoking. Possibly a device with a battery, or else someone putting fireworks or a cigarrete butt in them, who knows. But it gave the firemen something to do I suppose.

Is that because the firefighters are bored or because they want to show the public that they're doing something valuable before the public realizes that we don't need so many of them?

> They show up to random fender benders.

EVs can cause pretty bad fires from benign looking accidents. Perhaps this is for the best? Better safe than sorry as they say.

Or perhaps we should dial back on how many firefighters we keep employed at all times.

> We're facing the issue in Ontario where firefighters are bored out of their minds and are being used as first responders for anything and everything. They show up to random fender benders.

Aren't (many?) firefighters certified as paramedics?

We had this in NZ *years* ago at this point. Mate was a fire fighter for a few years (until his knees gave up, it's a brutal job) and he went to almost no actual fires. It was everything else.

I very rarely see actual candles being lit anymore. It's almost always fake candles with led lights.

> regulations around flammable clothes, bedding and mattresses

Yes, regulation that increased the proliferation of known carcinogens and endocrine disruptors in our households and pressed up against our spouses and children's skin and orifices.

Maybe I'll take the wrought iron fire escape.

> We're facing the issue in Ontario where firefighters are bored out of their minds and are being used as first responders for anything and everything.

With climate change we can repurpose them as waterfighters when sea level rise, floods and berm breaches become an acute problem.

> We don't really need multiple exits in case of fire

Tell that to the residents of Grenfell Tower.

Fire escapes are an anachronism for buildings with a smaller footprint that aren't terribly high. Brownstones and smaller (older) apartment buildings in NYC are classic examples. Some of those buildings were also timber framed so having an external and secondary exit was imperative, particularly after major 19th century fire disasters.

What really happened is we started building concrete and steel core buildings that were particularly high so external fire escapes weren't really practical or necessary because the of the building height and the fact that modern buildings typically nearly always have multiple sets of stairs with fire doors, which saved a bunch of lives in one of the WTC towers on 9/11 but not the other (where all 4 staircases were breached).

Having a single point of egress is an incredibly bad idea as evidenced by Grenfell Tower.

Firefighting in a large city versus a small town I assume are different, but the firefighters I know would never describe themselves as bored. They get paid to spend the majority of their time hanging out with friends, barbecuing, working on their cars, enjoying life, etc for the occasional hugely important and often terrifying life saving firefighting work.

They deploy more often than when I was a kid for EMT type work in place of or as first responder for ambulances. But, none of them would ever describe their day to day as boring.

During a real fire at my school, also in the UK, a cast iron fire escape partially collapsed. I don't remember any mention of injuries, and it was replaced with a new, steel staircase within a few weeks.

A old brick-wall building is basically a pretty shell protecting a wood frame.

The most essential unspoken purchase for anyone living higher than the ground floor in an older building is an emergency escape ladder.

Wood is a great construction material. It has better insulation value than brick, and the CO2 costs are vastly better.

>What would burn in those manhattan buildings? Are the internal walls wood?

Me? I'd certainly prefer that didn't happen.

Which is why I'm glad I have a fire escape. Should there be a fire that either blocks access to the main stairwell and/or my front door, there's an additional egress point at the other end of my apartment.

I'd much prefer that there wasn't a fire at all, but I'd much rather have multiple egress points for me and my animals than having to sit and wait to die of smoke inhalation if a serious fire were to rip through my (more than a century old) apartment building.

Your flame resistant furniture will pyrolize just fine once the apartment gets hot enough. Just takes one idiot keeping their budget lithium bike inside to ignite the whole mess--ask me how I know.

The construction is there to isolate suites and delay the spread, but don't kid yourself that a given suite doesn't contain enough fuel to have a major fire, given the right ignition source and tinder.

A lot of buildings now require at least two stairwells for buildings over three stories. There's talk in Massachusetts of easing that requirement the requirement to four or six stories, which is more common worldwide and could help build more affordable housing.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/28/opinion/stairwells-bu...

Every large building in the last 100 years has been built with multiple integral fire-safe paths of egress for the very reason that a path should be available if one is blocked. The design of buildings is very much conditioned on tables in the fire code about how many paths of egress, how large they must be, and how long they can be based on how many people need to be evacuated. (Not to mention how many hours of fire each door and partition must be designed to resist.) It's kind of a PITA. And it works very well.

External fire escapes are merely the retrofit allowed to old single-stairway buildings to get them to be vaguely as safe as a modern building.

> Fascinatingly in Germany it is just the other way around.

You're contrasting rules for new construction with rules for existing buildings during renovation.

It's difficult and often impractical to retrofit a protected stairway into an existing building, but it's not a major hardship to include in new construction (although requirements can substantially change layouts)

It's called Practical Engineering, not Abstract Debate Between People Who Think (Rightly or Wrongly) They Know Better Than the Experts.

I've got my own qualms about AFCIs, but I'm still going to install/use them in my own house. The only thing that could move that needle would be if they're actively harmful. Like I'm certainly not putting GFCI on the sump pump circuit.