Of interest … Buffalo Fire Department (NY)

thanks Jason

Tags: American LaFrance fire trucks, Buffalo Fire Department, chicagoareafire.com, fire apparatus in Buffalo NY

This entry was posted on February 5, 2023, 8:00 PM and is filed under Fire Service News. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

4 Comments

#1 by Steve Axis on February 11, 2023 - 7:43 AM

Fire apparatus is often times low on the priority list for replacement. If Buffalo diligently maintained their fleet, a 15 year lifespan might be a stretch but a town like Buffalo should automatically default to replacing a certain amount of rigs each year. Many towns don’t operate this way due to the size and demand. Small towns may buy a rig every 10 years where a large town like Buffalo should have a strategic replacement plan in place to order a certain amount annually. My department orders one ambulance per year. With delays in production, we are not getting a new ambulance every year now but we consistently have one on order most of the time. This means our ambulances are replaced about every 7 years. 5 years in frontline, 2 years as a spare. The ambulances aren’t in bad shape after 5 years but it means we still have decent spares. When a frontline rig is in bad shape, what condition are the spare rigs in? I cant’ stand the motto of dragging out the life of a rig till it’s on life support then putting it as a spare. I don’t think a spare needs to be as nice as a frontline since it’s not getting the same call volume but it drives me crazy when the spares don’t have heat, make weird noises,
#2 by crabbymilton on February 6, 2023 - 8:46 AM

If I had to guess, these problems didn’t just happen overnight. Poor maintenance and/or neglect or just plain bad management.
#3 by Austin on February 6, 2023 - 8:08 AM

I don’t understand why the chief doesn’t want to buy new apparatus when the fleet is clearly old. Even with people pressing him to buy new apparatus, he still doesn’t want to. It doesn’t make sense to me. Also anyone who is a commissioner for any department in a city, and refuses to answer basic questions is not someone who should be in a position of power.
#4 by Mike C on February 6, 2023 - 7:12 AM

I’m glad the media has brought this to light. The citizens and businesses of Buffalo should be outraged.

American LaFrance has been out of business for more than 9 years. Buffalo has quite a few ALF’s still in their fleet. I don’t think ALF had a lot of proprietary parts but I would assume anything proprietary is very difficult to come by.

A 10 year old rig isn’t bad if it’s maintained. FDNY has 10 year old rigs that see very heavy call volume. It doesn’t sound like the rigs are well maintained.

As the union president mentioned, Buffalo should be purchasing two engines and one ladder truck per year. This would mean about a 10-12 year rotation per rig which seems pretty consistent for a city like the size of Buffalo.

The sad part is that Buffalo has disbanded several companies over the years.

At this point, Buffalo needs to place a relatively large order NOW just to catch up.