"Quints"...your experiences, sop's etc...

I may be, I wont pretend to know how a major metro citys demographics work, its a little over my head. I feel that when the quints were first introduced the belief was that it would alleveate finacial burden by dropping man power not just the fleet maintenance/CIP aspect. It is my opinion from experience with my department that it becomes very hard to keep proficent in both engine and truck company ops. I feel that dedicated Engine/Truck crews allow for tactical proficencey at incidents. Not to mention the trouble of fitting engine and truck equipment onto the apparatus itself.

Our department wether it be lack of training or ignorance has had problems using the quint at scenes i.e. Having the operator run both the stick and the pump, failing to call for a ladder after commiting the quint to Engine ops ect... Real CF's sometimes. Is there any articles or books that discuss tactical uses of quints or advice from anybody, It wuld be nice to forward to Training. Still not sold on the Idea, but try to keep an open mind

I agree with you Irons, I am no fan of quints and I think their perceived value is much greater than their actual value in FD operations. That being said, I think they probably have their place in a small percentage of FDs. For cities struggling to meet public safety demands in the face of declining populations and revenues, I favor the Rochester NY quint/midi concept becuase I think it makes the best use of that level of resources. Single engine houses keep their std. engines and two piece houses run the quint and the midi with staffing of 6. Generally you are keeping all of your stations open, keeping essentially all of your ladders in service (with 100 footers) and you actually gain some overall pumping capacity. No question you're losing staff at the two piece houses. The only other real option to make use of standard engine/truck deployment is the loss of both engine and truck companies and some station closings. Rochester would likely be in the 14 engine/7 truck range vs. 8 engines and 9 two piece quint/midi companies. So effectively they would down probably a couples engines and a couple trucks and probably a couple stations. Some might argue that's the lesser of two evils.

Firefighters assigned to quints are....

bi-trucksual! :D

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Originally Posted by CaptainGonzo

Firefighters assigned to quints are....

bi-trucksual! :D

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New title for the Quintee over at the "other" site? ;)

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Originally Posted by Res343cue

New title for the Quintee over at the "other" site? ;)

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Nah...he's had that for a while ;)

I love the "Bi-Trucksual" quote!...I see a patch in the works...haha... :)

Our Deparment has one, designated a ladder, but techinically a quint. It's an E-One HP75, and we love it. It's always on the first alarm, and we utilize it to its fullest, functioning as an engine, ladder, or both if warranted. And we also do lay supply line with it as well.

Kfactor - you've got all your facts pretty well spot on. (You may know more about my department than I do... :) )

In the interest of full disclosure, the only correction that I would make is that the tower is only 95 feet. We used to have two of them, but one got replaced by a 100' stick with a waterway.

As someone who works on a quint almost all of the time, I see that we are even more of a `jack of all trades, master of none' than normal. An engine company can probably move hose better than we can, and a truck can get a place searched and vented more efficiently than us, but when we are alone onscene we can get the ball rolling on both, so it works out okay. No one should ever be deluded, however, into thinking that a quint in an urban career setting is not a manpower reducing measure. It is. We have a good and effective department, but we have about 200 fewer line positions than we did thirty years ago. Going to quints is probably not something you want to happen to your department, but if staffing cuts are GOING to happen, quints may be better than some alternatives (engines w/3, trucks w/ 2, etc...)

....Bi-trucksual... nice ;)