> 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.

In my town every firefighter is also an EMT and every fire truck has an AED and ventilation bag. And the local firehouse is invariably closer to basically everything than the ALS ambulance is.

So over the last several decades, "firefighter" has really just become emergency responder, where "emergency" can be a lot of things that happen in society pretty often.

Firefighting is a a task with a pretty intrinsically bursty demand. You're employing them for the very peak of that demand and otherwise you want them working on relatively low priority things that can be dropped in an emergency.

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

When there is a fire you still need enough at location in time.

The fact that there are enough in short distance with good equipment is one of the things which causes the low number of big fires: once the mandatory detector goes of for a little fire they are on site before it becomes big.

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

The problem is you need a good number when there is a serious fire, even if it doesn't happen very often.