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Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

5k fires/year may not seem like much compared to the billions of non-incident pumps, but what about our limited municipal firefighting capacity? Wouldn't gas pump fires contribute to their being overloaded, unnecessarily, when all is required is a simple rule that hurts no one?

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What limited municipal firefighting capacity? Firefighters hardly fight any (urban) fires these days, because of better building codes and fewer people smoking.

Where do you live? Do your firefighters just sit around taking no calls all day? Where I live (top 5 city in the US, with some of the most restrictive fire building codes) the average firehouse gets 80+ calls a day.

What percent of those calls are actually necessary calls though? I used to watch a fire truck roll up at least once a week to check up on the same dude napping on the sidewalk. Not to try and say that the majority of their calls are like that, but that does suggest a system with at least some spare capacity.

What percent of hospital stays are "actually necessary"? Who do you want to decide that?

>Who do you want to decide that?

The hospitals, I guess? I'm making inferences from the judgement-making of...whoever, not second-guessing them.

If anything, I'm giving complete faith to the system here. My assumption is if they can send out a full fire-truck to respond to a call where clearly an ambulance would be sufficient, they're not doing it despite there also being a fire that needs response.

I doubt even 1/4 of those are actual fires, in my town firefighters show up to car crashes and heart attacks and shootings and all sorts of things that aren't on fire.

If one firehouse gets 80+ calls a day, 3000 calls per year nationwide is nothing.

Yes, but it's rare for one to be for a serious fire. Most firefighter calls these days are for medical issues.

Gas stations have built in fire suppression. It’s a stretch to link this to firefighting capacity. Nanny states are annoying.

In cases when a gas station's fire suppression is triggered, in how many cases does the fire department never come out? I would estimate that they come out every time anyway.

From the article gas station fires cause $20M in damage annually. Not to mention toxic fumes.

Even with suppression someone has to intervene to reduce it from suppressed to extinguished, and that’s usually the fire department.

The numbers are very small, but it’s not nothing.

The key point though would be seeing if these risks are far lower in OR and NJ, or not.

Edit: $20M, not $20B

I would also be interested in a cost-benefit analysis for this intervention (full service pumping) compared to, say, different fire safety protocols, rules that allow only essential gas pumping to be done (like when your tank is below half full), or other approaches.

I also wonder if it's OK that we let each state decide for themselves rather than creating a federal mandate with what is judged by leading experts to be the best solution.

> From the article gas station fires cause $20B in damage annually.

No. That number is wildly wrong.

Sorry, M instead of B. So yeah, off by 1,000x. Good catch!

How many fewer incidents does NJ have per non-incident pump, can the other states?

How much safer is it in NJ?

If the data showed there was no difference, would you support repealing the pump mandate?

I don't have a horse in this race, I'm just interested in the facts.

Your phrasing in the comment I initially replied to suggested that you believe the pump mandate reduces the number of fires. If that's the case, it should be demonstrable with data and it should be front and centre in every discussion, surely?

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