With so few fires in cities these days, do we need so many firetrucks?

We all love firetrucks: giant red road-locomotives with a cool siren and a ladder on the back. When you’re a kid, you yearn for the chance to wear that back-billed helmet and sit up high, pretending you’re on your way to stamp out urban destruction.

But with modern structures built nearly fireproof, good wiring installed in old houses, and the industrialized world generally a safer place than it’s ever been, do we really need a fire hall around every corner?

Sure, it’s a heck of an adrenaline rush when one of those trucks roars past you on the street, jarring you away from sports talk radio. But city figures show that there’s a nine out of ten chance that truck won’t be going anywhere near a fire on that call. In all likelihood, that truck is racing to a medical emergency that could probably just as easily be handled by an ambulance (though the fire trucks typically get there first; more on that later).

A report in May by the Fraser Institute said that spending on firefighters and fire services has been on the increase, even as the incidence of reported fires has gone down.

And according to the Toronto Fire Services annual report, 9,291 of the department’s 120,512 calls (just under 8 percent) in 2013 were for actual fire emergencies, while 66,049 were of a medical nature. Figures like these get heavy traction in reports about misplaced city spending and rile up EMS workers who would rather see city resources diverted to add more ambulance staff.

“If you look at the cost of a fire truck versus an ambulance, obviously there’s a dramatic difference. The vehicle cost alone is different,” says Jeff Van Pelt, president of CUPE’s Ambulance committee.

So fire trucks are pricey, and loaded with pricey heavy equipment that probably will just sit on the truck while firefighters are doing CPR.

But that 8 percent fire emergency number perhaps doesn’t tell the whole story of what firefighters are up to.

Of those 120-some thousand calls, another 21,935 were false alarms, which you can appreciate fire fighters should actually attend. Another 1,568 were vehicle fires, and a further 7,202 were vehicle incidents, which presumably means crashes of some kind or another, where fire is a possibility and extrication equipment (the ‘jaws-of-life’ that firefighters bring along) may be needed. There were also a few thousand rescue calls, some carbon monoxide emergencies, and gas leaks thrown in. They’re not fires, but the idea of emergency services to a certain degree is the old saw about how it’s better to have it and not need it than the alternative.

“When you look at the three emergency services, police, EMS and fire, you see that the police and EMS have very specified roles, so the police are concerned with law enforcement, and EMS handles medical care,” says former firefighter and current Seneca College Firefighting program co-ordinator William Sault.

“Which leaves the fire department to do everything else basically.”

‘Everything else’ can include hazardous material issues that require protective equipment, vehicle extrications, assists to police in drug busts where explosive material might be present, as well as typical city rescues.

“You get a window washer that get stuck on the 30^th floor, police and EMS aren’t really equipped to deal with that kind of emergency,” says Sault.

Some of this may seem like make-work projects for idle hands, and to a degree that may be true. But the reality is that urban fire prevention works on the premise that there be equipment at the ready within reasonable proximity of potential fires.

So in a city the size of Toronto, you need a certain number of staffed fire stations, so that restaurant fire on Queen and John doesn’t spread while waiting for the pumper truck to arrive from Parkdale.

There are also insurance matters to consider. Urban firefighting capacity is assessed regularity to determine what rates to charge to insure downtown buildings. If firefighting capacity drops, rates can go up. A study undertaken by the city two years ago assessed that Toronto’s level to had fallen to a class 4 from a 3, which the city estimated could raise insurance costs by as much as $15 million per year.

So it’s a complicated and imperfect system, and the paradox is that the safer a city is, the more likely its firefighters are sitting around like the Maytag repairman (except, when that dishwasher does break down…).

The recent push has been in fact to move firefighters even further into the medical emergency field. The Ontario Professional Fire Fighters Association is lobbying for the creation of “fire-medics” who could provide extra medical interventions in situations where fire trucks arrive at a medical emergency before ambulances (which happens quite a lot, due to the convenience of fire stations).

With increased cross training between firefighters and EMS workers, some expect more merging of the two roles down the road.

So maybe the way to look at them in a modern context is not as firefighters, but as emergency responders with a big truck and a hose. You know, just in case it’s needed.