Less than 5% of fire department calls are for actual fires. The other 95% are medical emergencies, welfare checks, and other stuff that doesn't need an 18-ton truck and four people. But fire departments keep insisting on the whole apparatus anyway. So an elderly woman having chest pain gets a massive fire truck rolling up. A department that should be mostly firefighters has become an incredibly expensive ambulance service. SF Fire's budget is $550M for 6,550 fires, mostly outside, only 300 building fires a year. The math is brutal. This is just institutional bloat defended by branding. Time to actually separate emergency response into what it needs to be: medical calls go to medics, actual fires go to firefighters. Not everything needs to be a spectacle.