MISNOMER
I don’t know how I got here. Somehow I developed this crazy belief that firefighters fought fires. Crazy, right? My bad.
Per capita, Vancouver is one of the country’s busiest fire departments, and getting busier all the time. But almost none of that fire service activity involves firefighters marching into buildings, masks on and hoses over their shoulders, to beat back flames. As a matter of fact, if you eliminated calls for service that weren’t for fires or false alarms (which have always been inevitable but have seen a significant rise recently) you would eliminate the overwhelming majority of what these massive vehicles full of highly trained specialists spend their time doing.
To me, learning this was something like finding out that orthodontists spend their days mostly providing massage and acupuncture services. Is that a terrible analogy? It was like hearing that essential lawn maintenance and tinkering with sprinklers is what professional golfers do with their on-course time; or something like learning the only time your history professor engages with the subject is during week-long annual conferences, because they're otherwise too busy studying, publishing, and lecturing in physics.
