Putting up a shop in CA - fire department being a pain

jeff alder said
If the fire department chose to buy a 70,000 pound fire truck partially with this man's tax money and then adopt all these requirements for compaction and load requirements they should pay for it. I have never heard of a fire department being able to dictate how a free private citizen supposedly protected by the United States Constitution builds his private driveway on his own property. Our fire department is all voluntary. Every year they sponsor a huge cash bash, and the community supports their needs. If they get the truck stuck, we all help them get it out.

70,000lbs sounds like a lot, but most typical fire engines are in the 30-50k range. Our water tender is 50k with a full tank, and it's not even a big one.

72bluNblu said
The average fire engine costs close to 1 million dollars now. The average fire truck, with the 100’ aerial ladder needed for fighting many large commercial building fires like some of your shop buildings would be, are closer to 3 million each. A decent sized shop, well involved with fire might easily require 3-5 fire engines, 2 trucks and upwards of 30 firefighters to extinguish.

And of course, it’s not like you’re building shelter. You’re building a shop for your hobby, where you will likely be doing stuff like welding, working with flammable chemicals, storing fuel, tires, and whatever other highly flammable items you can stuff in there. So the risk of fire is much higher than a regular old house and the risks of fighting that fire are exponentially higher.

So you don’t want to pay, because you’re cheap bastards. But I bet if your shop catches fire you probably still want the fire dept to show up and put it out right? And show up fast enough and fight fire aggressively enough to keep that fire out of your home? Your neighbors home? You’d want them to evacuate your family if you or your neighbors weren’t home when that happened right? Of course you do.

I’ve been a professional firefighter for over 20 years. I’ve been burned, broken bones, torn cartilage, had surgery, collapsed from exhaustion, pulled muscles and generally abused my body to save people’s lives, property, etc. I’ve watched several of my coworkers die from cancer, some of whom were younger than me. And watched many more fight cancer despite being young and healthy individuals that don’t have history or risk factors beyond the carcinogens they’re exposed to in this job.

So yeah, building your shop costs some money. And yeah, we got tired of risking our lives fighting fire in some death trap that some moron built cheap in his backyard, so there’s fire code you have to follow so we don’t die because of your stupidity. We don’t get to pick and choose which fires we go to, we go to all of them.

For @ESP47, I would suggest getting ahold of whoever is doing the plan review at South Placer Fire. They should be willing to explain what they need and why, and if there are any exemptions or variances that your particular project might qualify for. A lot of that stuff is required per code based on property size or square footage, so sometimes it pops up on projects that don’t necessarily need some of that stuff for other reasons.

Never realized you were a firefighter, I've got 13 years on (late bloomer). You said all I was going to say here and more.

And to touch on the comments earlier about stretching longer lays of hose -- yes, of course they (we) have hundreds of feet of handline, and likely a thousand feet +/- of larger diameter supply hose. Regions vary, but in general, that's a safe assumption. We can get to some pretty hard to reach places stretching line, but I'm assuming they've put that code in place so they can get their apparatus staged appropriately and not 200 feet away.

The longer the lay, the more water is needed to fill all that hose, and more manpower is required to stretch all that hose before even getting to work.