It's 2020, people talk a lot about self-driving cars and travelling to Mars, and yet such terrible preventable tragedies still happen even in successfull countries to successful people. So sad.
A good reminder to have fire alarms installed in every part of your house. We have one in each bedroom, each common area, and the hallways too. They are ten year alarms, so if we still live here in ten years, when one of them starts going bad we will just replace them all at once. Very simple step you can take to reduce your risk without much effort.
In 2020, our firefighters here in Toronto are bored. They go to car accident scenes to simply block traffic, they show up at 911 calls to talk with people and see if they can offer aid while waiting for paramedics/ambulance, two or three trucks will show up for our small walkups occasional false alarms. My brother and nephew are cops, they end up shooing the fire trucks away from minor accidents because they clog up traffic with their trucks and multiple firefighters just hanging around.
The reasons for this boredom are fantastic news: smoke detectors, safer vehicles, mandatory sprinklers even in small complexes, mandatory fire escapes, laws around flamability of furniture/clothing/bedding, reduced smoking, better awareness of fire hazards.
Yes, these tragedies still happen, but don't make it sound like we're not doing anything because right now one of our biggest issues is too many fireman for the drastically reduced number of vehicle and house fires we have: we paid for all of these safety programs and we still pay for the fireman they should have replaced.
The reason firefighters are often the first on the scene of an accident or 911 call is because fire stations are spread throughout the community. They’re the closest first responders and can get there faster. Not because they’re bored and have nothing better to do.
They probably do have nothing better to do, and that's a good thing. Basic queuing theory says that a system needs excess capacity in order to be able to respond to peak demand - you can't just tell a second fire to wait for an hour while fighting the first one. If three engines respond to a fender bender and a more pressing call comes in, they will leave and go there.
I had an immediate family member in the hospital when that "nurses playing cards" ignorance was going around. I wish nurses did have some time to play cards, because it would mean they'd answer when they were needed, rather than being busy with other patients for an hour and then forgetting. We truly are optimizing ourselves to death.
Another recent example was when the pandemic team of the National Security Council was disbanded, and the reason given was that the president doesn’t like to have people “just sitting around.”
