FDNY "Quints"

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Has FDNY ever considered "quints" the type that are used in St. Louis with 75' ladders. I know that in the early 80's FDNY had  two Sutphen's Ladder 14 and 119.
 
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grumpy grizzly said:
Has FDNY ever considered "quints" the type that are used in St. Louis with 75' ladders. I know that in the early 80's FDNY had  two Sutphen's Ladder 14 and 119.

although im not a firefighter and probaly never will be i think quints suck and shouldnt even be consider for a big city like this where manning will be cut. And please dont give the city any ideas 
 
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The Sutphens at L 14 and L 119 were classified as tower ladders; never thought of as quints.
 
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To be honest I wouldn't mind seeing the squads be assigned quints since they do both engine and truck work.
But as a general use of having quints replace the current engine/ladder system I would have to say please God no, it would more or less completely mess up the current system and dynamic in the FDNY.
 
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I remember it was proposed as an experiment a few years ago [possibly late 80's] with two of them. One going to E70 in City Island and the other to E164 in Staten Island.  I believe they were going to be called "Mini-Maxies", but thankfully, it never got off the ground. ;)
 

Bulldog

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The Rochester New York fire department has been using a Quint-Midi system for many years and is in the process of getting rid of it and going back to the standard Engine-Truck arrangement.  On paper Quints makes sense but in practice they don't.  Your average price per piece of apparatus is much higher and in most cases you still need to respond with about the same number of pieces since manpower is usually the determining factor for fire suppression.  They might make sense for the Squads since they operate independently as either a truck or an engine but they wouldn't make sense for the other units.
 
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I agree that Quints are a hassle. If it goes out of service you lose both engine and ladder capabilities. The only reason I made the post was for special applications such as Engine 70, which at one  time had a ladder retro-fitted to the original 'squrt' application
 
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Nowadays I don't see that likely to happen, even at engine 70.  With 53 also on the Island there isn't really any need for E70 to perform truck work, especially since more than likely with any box on the island they're going in as an engine.
 
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The only thing we had that were close to Quints were a few 1970 Mack CF's with squrt booms. One was changed to a telescoping Telesqurt boom that went to E-70 and is now out in Texas somewhere after stops in Lake Carmel, NY (Ladder 17-5-1) and Wall, PA.
 
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mmattyphoto

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If I'm not mistaken when E70 had that rig L53 had been closed and they rode with 7or 8 members. maybe someone can verify.
 

Bulldog

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I don't know how a engine with a boom Squirt and be considered a quint because they cannot perform the rescue aspects of a truck company.  All they have is a very flexible master stream device.  A tele-squirt is only marginally able to fulfill the needs of a quint.  New York depends on trucks so much I'm very surprised they even tried to utilize a squirt.
 
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Quints really equal Problems.

If you have a quint 1st due into a box, what are they going to do? Engine work! Now what is the next in engine doing? The truck work the quint should have been doing. Now what does the 1st due ladder company do? Stretch the backup line!

Leave wellenough alone. No pumps or tanks on Ladder trucks..... Let the trucks do truck work and the engine guys get all the glory  ;D
 
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mmattyphoto said:
If I'm not mistaken when E70 had that rig L53 had been closed and they rode with 7or 8 members. maybe someone can verify.
I think E70 was a two piece company then with a regular engine and the rig with the boom. The manning might have been 7 or 8
 
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Squad2 said:
Quints really equal Problems.

If you have a quint 1st due into a box, what are they going to do? Engine work! Now what is the next in engine doing? The truck work the quint should have been doing. Now what does the 1st due ladder company do? Stretch the backup line!

Leave wellenough alone. No pumps or tanks on Ladder trucks..... Let the trucks do truck work and the engine guys get all the glory  ;D

St. Louis runs a department with the "Total Quint Concept". Every rig has an aerial device and pump. Engines have I think a 75 foot stick, and the Truck companies have a 105 foot stick. The way they do it is, the first engine acts an engine, the second due engine does truck work. They also only run with an officer, a chauffer and two guys on the back step. They have realized that it doesn't work for them, so they are going back to Engines and Trucks, with one Quint in each Battalion.
 
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Richmond Virginia has or had something similar. We've "heard" they had all kinds of problems with the quint concept also. I do not know if it has been abandoned or not. 
 
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The following is quoted from the Richmond website(1):

Richmond's Department of Fire and Emergency Services won the 1999 Fire Service Excellence Award for its Total Quint Transformation and the 1998 Public Service Excellence Award from the Public Employees Roundtable for its Total Quint Concept, which dramatically increased performance while reducing costs.

The Richmond Department of Fire and Emergency Services is the only fire department in the United States that operates under the Total Quint Concept.

Dubious honors, to be sure.

Quints are a bureaucrats dream and a fire victims nightmare by the looks of it.

I like what Mike Ward has to say about it.
http://firegeezer.com/2008/07/15/fiscal-forecast-mostly-cloudy/

1. http://www.ci.richmond.va.us/departments/fire/operations/quint.aspx
 
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oldfiredog

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grumpy grizzly said:
Has FDNY ever considered "quints" the type that are used in St. Louis with 75' ladders. I know that in the early 80's FDNY had  two Sutphen's Ladder 14 and 119.

D.C. Teddy Goldfarb  (div. 8 ) wanted to try the concept in Staten Island, but the proposal was shot down in the late 80's
 
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oldfiredog

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johnd248 said:
The Sutphens at L 14 and L 119 were classified as tower ladders; never thought of as quints.

That was L. 14 and L.163 in Woodside.  They were known as Aardvarks by the neighboring companies.
 
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