Does our area assign departments jobs?

In our district, one company is water supply, one is fire attack, and one is ladders. Also, our company (fire attack)runs heavy rescue with hurst tools, air bags, high angle, confined space, etc. etc.
I haven't been a member of my company for long, so I can't speak from personal experience, but this seems like a good idea to me. Except for my company being fire attack. I cant imagine another comapny running arould laying LDH while we do all the fire attack.
This seems like it would be a good way to keep neighboring companies from going out and all buying ladders, heavy rescues, hazmat, etc. I am not sure how well it works out in reality though. Another of the companys in our small district (less than 10 square miles) has a rescue pumper also equipped with the jaws, air bags, and i'm not sure what else. I kind of wonder why this is necessary with us being at most 10 minutes away from their first due area. We are the only company assigened on the only hiway in town anyway.
Just wondering, does anyone else have this kind of setup? Obviously, every company has to be able to do fire attack and initial ground laddering, but not every company needs to run every specialty, except maybe where mutual aid is far out.

In answer to the question of depts. needing the same speciality equipment, is no in my opinion but that said most all depts. want to have the same equipment so they can run the calls and not need any help.
In our county, we have a county wide rural fire protection district made up of 16 individual depts. The county dispatch protocall states that on fire calls the 2 closest fire depts. are paged with the third closest being paged as a standby company. On rescue or first responder calls this is not true because not every dept. has the equipment or training to rescue or first respond. Our county has 5 jaws of life units located in the north, south, east, west, and central parts of the county. The bad part of this system is that it can make for some long responses to some areas of the county. The good part of the system is that the depts. with less equipment can use the money they get to upgrade their training and fire equipment so that the county is protected from fire. When the fire district started there were 8 depts. serving the county and the property loss due to fire was high and now the loss due to fire is down so our fire district is going in the right direction. Not all the depts. receive the same amount of money. The four biggest get more ( of which we are one) with the rest getting less. It is based on the amount of equipment and service each dept. has and provides.

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Good Luck And Be Safe
Captain
Craig Lambert

Not that it's officially coordinated, but *generally* stations alternate one with a big Tanker (2000-3000gallon), the next with a lot of hose (2500' +/- 5").

It used to be, and we've gotten away from it unfortunately, that departments coming in knew their role -- 1st did fire attack, 2nd was in charge of securing water by laid line or tanker and providing the Water Supply Officer, and the 3rd due went right away to salvage work.