Fire Department FAQs

Why are fire trucks sent to non-fire emergencies?

Orange Township Fire Department is an all hazards response capable department.  Your fire department can respond to emergency medical calls; structure, vehicle and outside fires; vehicle crashes; hazardous materials/weapons of mass destruction calls; technical rescues (i.e. water, rope, confined space, trench collapse, cave-in, and industrial entrapment); and other requests for service (carbon monoxide checks, unknown odors, malfunctioning equipment, etc).  As a result, your fire department needs to remain ready to respond with the needed equipment at any time to any of these types of calls.  In order to accomplish this state of readiness, the department keeps crews intact on a fire truck.
There are several reasons why a fire truck responds with a medic vehicle.

   1.      All of your firefighters are trained in EMS and all of your fire trucks carry advanced medical equipment.  This allows us to staff all major fire trucks with paramedics.
   2.      We try to send the closest vehicle to the incident.  If one medic vehicle is tied up on another call, it may take a little longer for a medic vehicle further away to arrive at the incident site, so sending a fire truck with trained paramedics enables a quicker response and patient care.
   3.      Not all EMS calls receive two vehicles; however, there are a number of Advanced Life Support EMS calls (i.e. trauma, cardiac, obstetrics, etc.) that we send two vehicles for extra personnel to help.  The extra personnel are there to support the medic crew as well as the family during their time of crisis.
   4.      Sending a fire truck allows us to keep a second medic vehicle in service for another call.  The department responds almost 3 to 1 to more EMS incidents than fire calls.
   5.      Keeping the crews intact and on the fire truck allows the ability to respond to another call with the needed equipment in a timely manner.
   6.      Many studies and articles have been done that support the sending of a fire apparatus with a medic vehicle and Orange Township is not alone in providing this type of response.  There are static costs involved, so we are paying for the fire truck crews whether or not they are being utilized on emergency scenes, so by having those crews respond it puts the personnel on the street, maintains driving skills, maintains medic skills and provides that additional assistance to the medic crews.  One such article can be found at http://firelawblog.com/2011/06/california-and-maine-two-anti-firefighter-anti-public-employee-headlines/

Why are the fire trucks at the store every day?

Your fire fighters are on duty 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.  Their day starts at 7:30 a.m. and does not end until 7:30 a.m. the next day.  Each firefighter contributes money for the daily meals and one firefighter has to go to the store.  Due to minimum staffing levels, this often times requires the whole crew to take a fire truck to the store.  No tax dollars are spent for daily meals.

Why do the trucks driving down the road with lights/sirens sometimes just shut their lights off?

Sometimes when we are responding to a call we are “canceled enroute”.  This means the situation to which we were responding has been mitigated and we are no longer needed.  Usually one of the responding vehicles will continue to the scene of the incident at normal speed to make a report.  In the case of our trucks responding to a mutual aid run in another district we will simply end our response and return to our station.