Why America Is Running Out of Fire Trucks

[LiberalArkie]

May 22, 2025

Across America, fire departments are facing a crisis as their aging fleets deteriorate while replacements remain out of reach.
Want to know what industries are ripe for disruption.

Cities from Seattle to Atlanta are forced to watch fire truck delivery times stretch from months to 2-4.5 years, with prices skyrocketing beyond municipal budgets. What's behind this mysterious shortage threatening our communities' safety? Who benefits from these artificial backlogs and astronomical price hikes? And how are innovative entrepreneurs fighting to break this dangerous cycle?

[displacedvermoter]

1. I have always said that a nationwide effort

to upgrade fire and ambulance service would be both a major economic boost and an upgrade to safety. Training and hiring full-time fire department personnel and ambulance services in many locations now served by volunteer units, and developing a vast industrial complex to build new equipment would generate billions of dollars and create millions of jobs. It would also be a real "national security effort" that would seem to be a win-win that Congress could enact on a bipartisan basis.

[LiberalArkie]

2. It still gets down to the fact that the vulture capitalists love monopolies

[displacedvermoter]

6. Undoubtedly, no argument there.

And we are also slaves to the Military Industrial Complex with obscene profits that make it impossible to spend on peacetime investments. No money for vocational training, health care, child care and public transit -- things working people need and want -- cause we spend so.much on bombs.

[JHB]

3. A related video. Not quite the same topic, but it does get into how other countries use standard commercial trucks...

...with customized loadouts for fire fighting and other emergency services rather than the big custom-built fire trucks that have become monopolized here.

[LiberalArkie]

5. Very good... I had wondered about all this.. Wearing out the expensive trucks for non-fires.

[k_buddy762]

4. I'm a member of my local fire board

and we have six other departments in a large metro area where we all collaborate. We've not seen this phenomenon at all. My (very small and rural) department has been able to buy used ladder trucks and pumpers from larger departments who have the funds for brand new apparatus, and the lead times on those new apparatus are not 2-4.5 years.... We ordered a Type 6 last week that will be here in Aug/Sept.

[Nigrum Cattus]

7. Another corporate greed story

Fire trucks are not hard to build. I have 47 years in the fabrication
industry. With current machinery like laser cutters, 3D printers, digital
shears and brakes they should take less time to build not more. I presume
what the corps. are doing is patenting all their parts so they control
everything.

[dalton99a]

8. Kick

[RandomNumbers]

9. Any chance you could summarize the answers?

some of us take information in more efficiently by reading than watching videos