Can someone estimate the real cost of some accident like this? I'm genuinely curious given it is potentially minimal damage to the truck but then there's medical costs for the people inside and other stuff. I'd guess somewhere between $100,000-150,000 but I legitimately have no idea.
In Philly a few year ago two fire trucks crashed into each other at an intersection. Both were totalled. They were the big full sized ladder trucks and I believe they cost in the neighborhood of almost $1M a piece to replace them. Not sure what other equipment that may have included. Smaller trucks like these are probably a couple of hundred thousand.
The risk is good enough for the insurance company to take. Really it works across the board; if you can afford insurance you can afford to be self-insured. The problem is that if you don't start with enough capital you don't know if you're going to have enough saved by the time you have your first 'claim'. If you knew you would live an average lifespan and could defer claims to the end of your life without penalty, it would be a good risk to take.
I would assume they are but regardless those trucks are expensive. The bigger problem for the city when that happened was the trucks are built to order so they were down two trucks until the replacements were available.
I work in public safety, when a truck gets old we actually make it a reserve truck when it gets replaced. We essentially have a stockpile of spares for when one needs to go out of service for an extended period of time, or a mass disaster that requires bringing on the off-duty personnel (IE, massive tornado.)
I can't speak for Philly, but a lot of places in my area operate on the same model.
That makes sense. I only know what little I read in the news at the time. It makes sense that the city would have to have some kind of backup plan because accidents happen.
This and during regular vehicle maintenance it allows one truck to be taken to a workshop for a day or two and cover still to be available in the area.
But even with the backup vehicles being available if I were responsible for an accident like the one in the vid I would get such a bollocking.
Place where I grew up still has a vintage Ford something from the seventies. Side-mounted ladders, pump in the front. Everyone knows the unit and has seen it growing up.
It's existence is somewhere between veteran museum piece, and back-up for when they run out of other back-ups.
The truck in this video is at least $250k, at the least. Thankfully it's not totaled, but the work to get it upright and working again is in the tens of thousands.
These days, new engines are around a million dollars in the states. Ladders are at least 1.5 million. Rescues depend on how heavy duty and whether they carry water, but they push up to a million.
That's before any equipment goes on.
The price rises each year as new NFPA safety standards are added.
Im not going to say that you cant spend that much on apparatus, but that is not the norm. I work as a career firefighter in a small city on the East Coast, and a volunteer in my home town as well. I have been involved in the replacement of 3 engines, a rescue, and a Tiller ladder in the last 5 years. Our Engines average about $300,000-$400,000 each, Rescues (ambulances) about $200,000 and a tiller ladder is 1.5-2.5mil. These are fairly basic pieces, and as you said, thats without equipment and the prices only go up.
I get you. But, I'm a PA volly who has been very involved in buying apparatus as well as in the know on what my neighboring departments have spent for theirs. I know what the prices have been for apparatus in our area.
The amount spent by each department depends largely on need and what the municipality can afford. Some bells and whistles are a pipe dream for some departments, I get it. Plus, some features are more needed than others, depending on your response area.
I was mostly speaking to the armchair experts saying with such authority that "I read these numbers in the news ten years ago" so these are what fire trucks cost! Those numbers are accurate for where I am. I'll completely agree that plenty of areas can go lower.
This exactly. Poor communication between trucks and unsafely running stop signs was exactly the cause. When I was in high school we had a cop come speak to us about driving safely. He told us about an accident he was called to and he was driving faster than he should have to get there and went off the road I to a ditch. A person in the accident he was responding to didn't make it and he always wondered if he had not crashed and made it to the accident if it would have made a difference. The lesson he was sharing is it is better to put safety first and get where you are headed than to not make it there because you didn't make the time for safety.
God that sucks. I guess those buildings they were on their way to (assuming it was a building fire) ends up burnong to the ground. Oh and now theres a huge clusterfuck where the crashed trucks are prevent ing any others from helping. Sounds like a true nightmare scenario....
It is pretty bad when it happens. It will happen too. Two apparatus down would cripple a smaller department. A larger department is going to be stressed especially if they are ladders or specialty rigs.
Why are ambulances top heavy? Aren't they basically vans with a bunch of medical equipment in them? I had actually imagined they'd be more bottom heavy.
Former Engineer here. Fire trucks are inherently hard to drive due to the large volumes of water on board. When you try and stop or turn, the weight of the water shifts and make the truck easier to overturn like this or even roll. In regards to stoping all the water rushes to the front of the tank requiring significantly longer stoping distances. If you’re a little too fast or a little off on the sharpness on your turn this is inevitable.
Plus there are guys who get in the service just to drive the engine like they stole it. When I'm the D/O I'm driving Miss Daisy, we might be 30-40 seconds slower getting there but we're getting there as safe as I can manage.
Very poor intersection practice. Blowing through red lights amped up in route to a fire. Fires are simply not that common anymore. When they do happen people get fired up hehe. Also a lot of new firefighter across the county with less experience.
Another reason fire equipment is so expensive: it's fire equipment. No, seriously. See that water valve for $99 at your farm supply store? Paint it red and put fire hose threads on it and it becomes $735.
By paying $735 some insurance will need to cover up if it fails, or rather by using the $99 part your insurance will tell you to stick it where the sun doesn't shine and laugh at you.
For business-hardware, that's always the case - it's quite a bit more expensive, but it either comes with huge convenience (like some laptop-brands being really easy to repair when compared to cheaper (or apple) stuff) or legal obligations you wouldn't get from the regular consumer variant.
Of course in case of women's power tools that doesn't apply - you pay idiot tax for a pink drill. But it's pink and 17 grams lighter, so perfect for weak women who need their drill to go with their shoes while doing handy work.
Fire equipment is also more expensive because it's guaranteed to be to spec. Just because they can use an off the shelf consumer part today doesn't always mean you can use that part tomorrow.
So this mistake was probably at least a $500k one but could be almost a million just in material. Ouch. Bet that sucked a lot for the people inside as well.
I agree, but there might be structural damage to the vehicle and I'm certainly not qualified to say if that vehicle is operational or not; I'll leave it to you and the more knowledgeable to enlighten me.
I'm a bus driver. I really doubt much was damaged other than paint and to flip it back up. I would imagine these are either stripped down crappy old ones for training or secure with bare essentials. Our new buses cost about 100k new. But once they go to auction about 3k. So, really you probably just earned a new nick name.
This was what I was guessing. The US Navy used old planes that were kinda disposable to train pilots to land on aircraft carriers during WWII, so why not use old trucks to train new drivers. That minimizes costs and gives them a lower stakes opportunity to train.
I don’t know exactly how fire trucks are built, but I drive an old ambulance that’s a similar age; if mine flipped on its side the aluminum skin would be ruined, and the box frame would be damaged, but the frame rails of the truck would be totally fine because these things are basically a box made from 1” square steel bars sitting on top of the frame rails at a few attachment points. The boxes are extremely strong and heavy, but probably would be very expensive to repair because it’s custom work.
With ambulances the boxes cost way more than the base vehicle, and fire trucks are significantly more custom than ambulances.
It looks fairly new, the last truck we decommissioned at my department was an 84', it was in service and fighting fire until just over a year ago. I'm not saying it's commonplace to have a department running with a 30 year old truck but it happens more often then you'd think.
Not a whole lot. Those are extremely old fire appliances which have probably exceeded their useful working life. They don't give the trainees new shiny ones to play with.
We had to buy fire trucks recently at work (long story) and they started at $500k new for the ladder truck and over that for the pumper, these were E-One models. I can't imagine that was any less than $50k worth of damage but as you can clearly tell I have no idea what I'm talking about
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u/NaturalContradiction Jul 30 '18 edited Jul 30 '18
Can someone estimate the real cost of some accident like this? I'm genuinely curious given it is potentially minimal damage to the truck but then there's medical costs for the people inside and other stuff. I'd guess somewhere between $100,000-150,000 but I legitimately have no idea.
Edit: a word