The Discovery Channel's "Dirty Jobs"[0] show made a segment involving the SFFD's ladder construction/maintenance crew. In it, they explained that wooden ladders are cheaper to maintain than aluminum ones and I think also discount fiberglass ladders as well.
It's worth a watch if one is interested in this topic.
LOL at SFFD giving any shits about costs. This is the same department that power grabbed emergency medical response away from dedicated paramedics in ambulances. Responding in full ladder trucks to take care of drunk homeless people...yeah, they do that, costing millions every year in added expenses and road repairs. But good for them for saving a few bucks on ladders, that must make a huge difference.
This is part of a first responder program, occasionally saving lives. Plenty of cities across the US do this sort of thing.
If you have an emergency - especially a medical one - whoever is closest is the right person to respond, be it fire department, ambulance, or police. 3 to 10 minutes in an emergency can make a huge difference. Like it or not, a drunk homeless person is generally a health and/or safety issue. Coming in trucks that they would usually drive also means that if there happens to be a fire call while they are out helping someone with possible first aid, they can leave from the scene, keeping more people safe. For auto accidents, sometimes the fire truck is one of the better things to have at the scene for visibility purposes.
I would also like to add that many - but not all - fire departments also drive ambulances.
Does it cost money? Sure. But if it helps folks, I'm for it. There are other options, but I'm not convinced they will cost less money (more ambulances of different sorts, more manpower for first responders positioned in places across cities, and so on... all have their costs).
I'd fully recommend actually looking into the reasons for some of this, and what other options are for similar outcomes.
You're not wrong, but it's more that they are in a position to help and the city doesn't seem to want to have another organization deal with the homeless. They're not exactly gunning for the role of taking care of the homeless.
>There's a city-specific reason why San Francisco has stuck with wood rather than swap over to metals, and the answer lies in looking up. The high-voltage cables and wires that guide the city's (oft-maligned) public transport system Muni, and trolley cars crisscross above nearly every street, mean that ladders made of conductive elements are generally just too dangerous to use.
>"I think there's a lot of fire departments that went aluminum and wish they could go back to wood but it's too expensive," Braun says. "There's only two ladders manufacturers in the states—and we're one of 'em. We only make our own ladders and can barely even keep up with what we have."
I am not sure what you are referring to. I was involved in a motorcycle accident in October of 2017 and I was treated by SFFD paramedics in an ambulance.
Americans seem to take a lot of pride in their fire brigades - their fire engines are still shiny and polished with more traditional signage and the fire fighters still wear helmets with their traditional shape.
In the United Kingdom they wear more simple uniforms and the engines are just a box shape with no bells any more - seems a shame.
Usually it's UK the has more ceremony in these kind of things.
One of the biggest differences between Europe and North America in this regard is that in European cities, emergency vehicles have to be designed to fit a 1000-year-old city in terms of width, turning radius, maximum weight, etc. This leads to a much more compact shape and shorter wheelbase.
In North America streets are designed to fit emergency vehicles. You're not allowed to build a street so narrow that a fire engine couldn't turn around there, for example.
A truck being small is not incompatible with a truck being a beautiful shade of red polished to a shine. Just look at Japanese firetrucks. They have some very small trucks that look great.
Honestly, from quickly looking at some images of UK firefighters, it seems the difference to me is that their equipment is modern, an not just in a design sense. Their helmets look better designed to protect the user and their fire engines look like they weren't purchased in the 70's.
So maybe the difference is that in the UK, they don't have to use old equipment
Maybe I'm not looking at the right pictures, because a quick Google Images search for "uk firefighters" and "us firefighters", I see no functional difference in what they're wearing, and the only difference in the firetrucks is that American firetrucks are massive bricks and UK firetrucks are either a European-style truck that looks basically the same as a US-style truck or are a Ford Transit van with some hoses.
The helmets look exactly the same except the ones in the UK don't have brims on the back.
They keep the engines shiny for multiple reasons. First, what else are you going to make the rookies do? ;-) Actually, keeping them shinny requires someone to pretty much go over every inch of the truck which is also a great time to do an inspection of the truck. Finding out something needs attention while sitting idle in the station is much better than finding out while out on response.
guessing this also has to do with the fact that most American homes are single-family wood framed structures, so the relative importance to people is perhaps higher.
Not really. Most firefighters in the US are volunteer, so not enough pride to pay people to do it.
In big cities, it's more of an internal camaraderie thing. They live together, cook together, shop together, etc. A lot prefer being at the station with their 'brothers' to being at home.
Most firefighters in the US are volunteer, so not enough pride to pay people to do it.
Having a volunteer fire department does not mean there isn't pride.
In fact, it can be argued the opposite -- Volunteer departments mean the citizens take enough pride in their brigade that they get directly involved in it, rather than farming it out as a civil service.
Volunteer firemen in the US certainly do get paid, or at least reimbursed. They're not working for free. And places with volunteer fire departments aren't volunteer because there's no pride, they're volunteer because there aren't enough fires to warrant paying people full-time to sit around doing nothing. They're on-call, and they get paid to respond to fires. In the meantime, they go to their normal job that also pays them money.
Around here, the state government subsidizes volunteer companies for equipment and facilities, and the fire district can bond with public votes that attract fewer voters than school board elections. My dad lives in a town with 250 annual callouts, a $10M firehouse and two $300k fire engines.
In the city that I live in a few miles away with a paid department, the firehouse next door does like 6,000 calls a year with a 2005 truck with 200k miles on it.
I can't think of any reason to acclimatize them this way instead of kiln drying/vaporizing them (depending) to roughly the right moisture content and waiting for 1% change (instead of kiln drying them to 0, or waiting forever for completely green wood)
There are studies going back to the 70's by the forestry service (and others) showing there is no change in mechanical properties of pine/fir from these drying schedules.
(This is not true of a lot of hardwoods, but is true of these softwoods)
Waiting years seems like a pointless waste of time.
The material they show in the article is massive. Thick, long and heavy. Even if there are kilns big enough, the wood would no longer be straight after a fast kiln drying.
A 50' 3x3" board would be twisted and bowed so much that the ladder would be a spiral staircase.
It doesn't matter for 20' 2x4 destined for a construction site.
Even if the wood was kiln dried, it would still have to acclimatizate for months or years before it would be at a stable 13% humidity of San Francisco.
"The material they show in the article is massive. Thick, long and heavy. Even if there are kilns big enough, the wood would no longer be straight after a fast kiln drying."
This is not true, depending on timeline.
It's true of the production rate kilns, and as you say, it doesn't matter for construction lumber, which is why they do it.
But assuming 3+ years to dry your 3x3" board, even doing it in a kiln at a 6 month rate (or whatever) would be a vast improvement, and would basically not bow or check. Again, there is actually a vast amount of research on drying schedules vs defects and how to optimize for whatever you want for a given wood species.
As for kiln size, again, solar kilns are quite trivial to build for basically any size or shape, and can easily be temperature controlled for something like this.
(and they could easily build a kiln in the space they have shown in that article)
To whit: I've built a solar kiln in maryland for 30+ ft boards before, and cost of materials was < $1000.
(I used to buy lumber from a guy who was responsible for handling downed trees for some cities in northern virginia, and he used to saw and sell the lumber. He did the nail removal, etc)
"Even if the wood was kiln dried, it would still have to acclimatizate for months or years before it would be at a stable 13% humidity of San Francisco."
Why? You can just stop drying it at 13% (instead of the 7-8% that is normal).
It probably is a waste of time, unless time is not a critical factor. If time is not a critical factor, it'd be a premature optimization to bother with a kiln.
"I bet the expert woodmakers doing this job have very good reasons. Reasons that you haven't thought of..
Seriously, these people are experts. They probably know their job, really, really well."
This is just a random appeal to authority.
If you would like to be constructive, please be constructive.
First, there is one person doing this. Or was. It was Jerry Lee, who recently retired. He did it for 30 years.
In fact, for giggles, i reached out this morning, and Jerry Lee says he is not an expert by any means in any of this. He was just a pattern maker who thought he could be helpful. He had no particular expertise in this when he started, and he would argue he is in fact, not an expert.
When I asked, he said they just didn't need to do it faster.
So it turns out no, they aren't magical experts trained in the artisanal art of ladder making with information passed down from the ages, and no, there are no magical reasons that only the wood cognoscenti have thought of.
Sorry.
They just use the forestry handbook data and info like everyone else!
If you get a chance to visit a Smokejumper base, I highly recommend it. One of the things you learn is that everyone on the team is required to make all of their own equipment by hand. So all of these highly trained, ex-military guys spend days on end doing nothing but sewing clothes and packing parachutes. The reasons described:
- Cheaper than contracting out everything
- They have a better idea of the exact specifications they need for everything
- It instills a strong culture of self-reliance and trust (anyone has to be able to pack your parachute)
- It fills a lot of offseason downtime
My takeaway is that it makes a lot of sense to in-house your own tools - a lesson from outside of the software industry.
Not true, especially in big city departments. Sure there are days when you run 3 or 4 calls and you get a lot of downtime, but most departments run 3000 or more calls a year. Do the math.
But yeah utilizing their downtime is smart. And you're gonna build a damn good ladder and not cut corners if you know you're going to be standing on it.
I think the low yield strength of aluminum also plays a role here, as one guy mentions. But I’m surprised thermal conductivity didn’t rate a mention.
There was a time when aluminum bikes were new but before the parts likely to bend were replaceable where many a bike owner had to buy a new frame due to misadventure. You can only bend aluminum once, then you’re done. When they started making cogsets with more than six gears they went with axles about half a centimeter wider, and you had a similar conversation. You can have the longer axles but you can’t change your mind after. They have to bend the stays slightly and there is no going back after that (and let me tell you, the mechanic got really quiet when they did the bend. You want to get it just right and every bike and every frame size is different. You pull until you feel the metal just start to give and just after that is your 5mm)
Steel frames could often be rebent. But they’re heavier and they don’t like moisture. And their strength to weight ratio is only about the same as wood. Probably also bad options for firefighters.
For what it's worth, every rated parachutist packs their own parachute. For the reserve chute, it's always packed or repacked by an FAA certified rigger, which is an incredibly high bar by comparison. They must be repacked every 6 months.
The estimate is that on average a parachute will fail one in a thousand times, mostly due to packing error, seldom due to equipment failure. Maybe 90/10 ratio.
For a reserve, the expectation is that they would fail less than one in 10,000 times they are deployed. Which means that, collectively, avoidable errors should only happen one in every million or so rides on a parachute. This is less often than the real observed rate (1 per 75k or so), but errors other than packing or equipment failure are often the root cause.
According to Wikipedia, it varies. Some organizations don't require the jumper to pack their own parachute. What does seem to be a common principle is that "All riggers are jumpers and can be asked at any time to jump with a parachute they have packed." or in the US military, that any rigger has packed, without knowing who.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parachute_rigger
My takeaway is that there are benefits to in-housing your own tools, not that everybody should.
There's also a middle-ground available in the software industry: reading the code of the open-source tools you use. You can understand how your tools work without rebuilding them from scratch. Also, if you're using open-source (which most people do these days), the "cheaper" argument doesn't apply.
Those smoke jumpers aren’t making their own nuts and bolts, ropes, cloth, or felling their own trees. They’re making tools by assembly. Many of us work the same way.
From what I understand every master craftsman has a small quantity of tools they either made themselves or at least modified to purpose. Tools with bits added on or ground off (eg, wrenches ground thin for tight spots, or magnetized).
I class jigs as a separate category but I have no handy parallel for software.
I remember reading in a Navy Seal's memoirs that when training to be a sniper, they were all responsible for making their own camouflage suits. The point being that when you're out in the open, you have to know how to make use of what's around you to camouflage yourself.
I do question this a little bit. One of my hobbies is racing sailboats, which doesn't have quite as exacting requirements as fighting wild fires, but it still requires specialized gear. I could not for the life of me make the splice required for a particular component on my last boat. It always looked good, but it inevitably failed after a few days of racing. When I bought one from an expert it would last for years.
Craftsmanship matters and you just won't become an expert building exactly the number that you need for yourself.
A related anecdote: There was for a long time, a history of students in certain disciplines such as physics and some areas of chemistry, making their own tools and equipment. My dad had to build an NMR as part of an analytical chemistry course. I built an exceptional amount of gear for my graduate research project. Of course there's the bit about using cheap labor.
But a side result is that you have a chance of actually understanding how your tools work, which is beneficial when developing new tools or when the tools stop working.
It's called scientific glass blowing, and is a pretty interesting field that highlights some of what has to go on in the background for scientific research to progress. Some other reading:
That might have more to do with 1)students being cheap & 2)researchers often needing custom equipment that is unavaliable commercially.
I know the justification given for undergrad chemists learning glassworking was the expectation that as professionals it would be a required skill.
Situation here is of real world which is different from software world. Real world equipment can degrade/develop faults after use so its important to inspect them before each job(especially when risk associated are very high) which is possible only when person is familiar with equipment construction and building things yourself is the best way to get familiar with its mechanics.Whereas in software world, things don't degrade with use and we have option to automate inspection cheaply.
There's an old saying among firefighters: "The fire service is 200+ years of tradition, unimpeded by progress". Now obviously that isn't strictly true, and SF does have some good reasons for sticking with their wooden ladders... but one can't help but suspect that sheer tradition is a somewhat significant factor.
Of course some departments adopt change faster than others, and some kinds of change are adopted more readily, so it's hard to make any sweeping generalizations.
> one can't help but suspect that sheer tradition is a somewhat significant factor
Only if you didn't read the article.
"There's a city-specific reason why San Francisco has stuck with wood rather than swap over to metals, and the answer lies in looking up. The high-voltage cables and wires that guide the city's (oft-maligned) public transport system Muni, and trolley cars crisscross above nearly every street, mean that ladders made of conductive elements are generally just too dangerous to use."
And only if you're also about 40 years behind ladder tech - notice the stepladders in the "A view of the main repair facility" photo?
They're nonconductive fiberglass.
They're stronger than wood, lighter than wood, don't need to be oiled/varnished, don't require cutting down old-growth trees, and aren't susceptible to moisture damage.
You can buy them exhaustively tested, mass produced, in whatever quantities you require for a couple hundred dollars - probably an order of magnitude less than these artisanal wooden ladders.
I would add that aluminum ladders tend to be bouncy because there's very little mechanical damping. I've climbed 30' aluminum ladders and in the middle it's like being on a trampoline. You have to go slow. Wood ladders seem better for racing up and down.
There are plenty of ladders on the market that are non-conductive. None of them are wood because wood is conductive. (though wood does have some interesting fire properties that probably make them better anyway)
Did you read the comment you're replying to? I said very specifically "SF does have some good reasons for sticking with their wooden ladders". And note that I said "a somewhat significant factor" NOT "the only factor" or even "the biggest factor".
In fact, I did read the article, and I see nothing that contradicts the suggestion that tradition is "a somewhat significant factor" in their continued use of wooden ladders.
It doesn't explain why they couldn't just buy wooden or fiberglass ladders though. I'm sure there are many vendors who would be happy to fill such a contract.
It's interesting, and I wonder to what extent sticking to tradition like this also helps them stick to tradition with regards to values. I mean, obviously, not all values from 200 years ago are worth hanging on to, but I see the firehouse as a place of mutual respect and trust and understanding. I wonder how much of that culture would fade if they just threw everything away and replaced it, had a purchasing department, etc. (for example).
This is where some of the real value of tradition lies. It's in the art of handing something down from mentor to protege, the time spent learning the craft, learning respect for what was done before, true appreciation for labour and effort.
I'm not sure why, but I'm reminded of that scene in Gangs of New York where two fire brigades show up to a house fire and proceed to duke it out over who has rights to put it out and plunder the building. The building ends up burning down.
"We had one ladder here that was fully involved in a fire for 25 minutes, and the whole tip of it—six feet—was crispy. It looked like a log you pull out of a campfire," Braun says. "That can't go back in service but we were curious, so we put a new halyard [rope used to hoist ladders] on it for a load test. Even in that condition, it passed."
Wood is a surprisingly good building material for surviving fires. A nice thick wooden beam can take days to burn through in a house fire where e.g. a metal support would yield as soon as it gets hot enough.
""Pete has collected all these different donuts over the years. They're all real, and covered with lacquer so they won't go bad. Some of these are ten years old.""
Readit News
It's worth a watch if one is interested in this topic.
0 - http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/dirty-jobs/about-this-show...
If you have an emergency - especially a medical one - whoever is closest is the right person to respond, be it fire department, ambulance, or police. 3 to 10 minutes in an emergency can make a huge difference. Like it or not, a drunk homeless person is generally a health and/or safety issue. Coming in trucks that they would usually drive also means that if there happens to be a fire call while they are out helping someone with possible first aid, they can leave from the scene, keeping more people safe. For auto accidents, sometimes the fire truck is one of the better things to have at the scene for visibility purposes.
I would also like to add that many - but not all - fire departments also drive ambulances.
Does it cost money? Sure. But if it helps folks, I'm for it. There are other options, but I'm not convinced they will cost less money (more ambulances of different sorts, more manpower for first responders positioned in places across cities, and so on... all have their costs).
I'd fully recommend actually looking into the reasons for some of this, and what other options are for similar outcomes.
You're not wrong, but it's more that they are in a position to help and the city doesn't seem to want to have another organization deal with the homeless. They're not exactly gunning for the role of taking care of the homeless.
>There's a city-specific reason why San Francisco has stuck with wood rather than swap over to metals, and the answer lies in looking up. The high-voltage cables and wires that guide the city's (oft-maligned) public transport system Muni, and trolley cars crisscross above nearly every street, mean that ladders made of conductive elements are generally just too dangerous to use.
>"I think there's a lot of fire departments that went aluminum and wish they could go back to wood but it's too expensive," Braun says. "There's only two ladders manufacturers in the states—and we're one of 'em. We only make our own ladders and can barely even keep up with what we have."
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In the United Kingdom they wear more simple uniforms and the engines are just a box shape with no bells any more - seems a shame.
Usually it's UK the has more ceremony in these kind of things.
In North America streets are designed to fit emergency vehicles. You're not allowed to build a street so narrow that a fire engine couldn't turn around there, for example.
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So maybe the difference is that in the UK, they don't have to use old equipment
The helmets look exactly the same except the ones in the UK don't have brims on the back.
The helmets are practical. They're basically construction hard hats with a rain brim.
In big cities, it's more of an internal camaraderie thing. They live together, cook together, shop together, etc. A lot prefer being at the station with their 'brothers' to being at home.
Having a volunteer fire department does not mean there isn't pride.
In fact, it can be argued the opposite -- Volunteer departments mean the citizens take enough pride in their brigade that they get directly involved in it, rather than farming it out as a civil service.
In the city that I live in a few miles away with a paid department, the firehouse next door does like 6,000 calls a year with a 2005 truck with 200k miles on it.
There are studies going back to the 70's by the forestry service (and others) showing there is no change in mechanical properties of pine/fir from these drying schedules.
(This is not true of a lot of hardwoods, but is true of these softwoods)
Waiting years seems like a pointless waste of time.
A 50' 3x3" board would be twisted and bowed so much that the ladder would be a spiral staircase.
It doesn't matter for 20' 2x4 destined for a construction site.
Even if the wood was kiln dried, it would still have to acclimatizate for months or years before it would be at a stable 13% humidity of San Francisco.
This is not true, depending on timeline. It's true of the production rate kilns, and as you say, it doesn't matter for construction lumber, which is why they do it.
But assuming 3+ years to dry your 3x3" board, even doing it in a kiln at a 6 month rate (or whatever) would be a vast improvement, and would basically not bow or check. Again, there is actually a vast amount of research on drying schedules vs defects and how to optimize for whatever you want for a given wood species.
As for kiln size, again, solar kilns are quite trivial to build for basically any size or shape, and can easily be temperature controlled for something like this. (and they could easily build a kiln in the space they have shown in that article)
To whit: I've built a solar kiln in maryland for 30+ ft boards before, and cost of materials was < $1000. (I used to buy lumber from a guy who was responsible for handling downed trees for some cities in northern virginia, and he used to saw and sell the lumber. He did the nail removal, etc)
"Even if the wood was kiln dried, it would still have to acclimatizate for months or years before it would be at a stable 13% humidity of San Francisco."
Why? You can just stop drying it at 13% (instead of the 7-8% that is normal).
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They have a long running stock. They are not wasting time anymore, they may be wasting storage though.
Something could be said about the stock fire risk exposure, but hey, they are the firemen after all.
I bet the expert woodmakers doing this job have very good reasons. Reasons that you haven't thought of..
Seriously, these people are experts. They probably know their job, really, really well.
This is just a random appeal to authority. If you would like to be constructive, please be constructive.
First, there is one person doing this. Or was. It was Jerry Lee, who recently retired. He did it for 30 years.
In fact, for giggles, i reached out this morning, and Jerry Lee says he is not an expert by any means in any of this. He was just a pattern maker who thought he could be helpful. He had no particular expertise in this when he started, and he would argue he is in fact, not an expert.
When I asked, he said they just didn't need to do it faster.
So it turns out no, they aren't magical experts trained in the artisanal art of ladder making with information passed down from the ages, and no, there are no magical reasons that only the wood cognoscenti have thought of. Sorry.
They just use the forestry handbook data and info like everyone else!
Bravo.
- Cheaper than contracting out everything
- They have a better idea of the exact specifications they need for everything
- It instills a strong culture of self-reliance and trust (anyone has to be able to pack your parachute)
- It fills a lot of offseason downtime
My takeaway is that it makes a lot of sense to in-house your own tools - a lesson from outside of the software industry.
this describes quite accurately the work of many people maintaining computer systems
But yeah utilizing their downtime is smart. And you're gonna build a damn good ladder and not cut corners if you know you're going to be standing on it.
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Which I think is the core issue, use other peoples tools unless you have some critical and unique requirement.
There was a time when aluminum bikes were new but before the parts likely to bend were replaceable where many a bike owner had to buy a new frame due to misadventure. You can only bend aluminum once, then you’re done. When they started making cogsets with more than six gears they went with axles about half a centimeter wider, and you had a similar conversation. You can have the longer axles but you can’t change your mind after. They have to bend the stays slightly and there is no going back after that (and let me tell you, the mechanic got really quiet when they did the bend. You want to get it just right and every bike and every frame size is different. You pull until you feel the metal just start to give and just after that is your 5mm)
Steel frames could often be rebent. But they’re heavier and they don’t like moisture. And their strength to weight ratio is only about the same as wood. Probably also bad options for firefighters.
Not really, just a forgotten one. Fred Brooks described his ideal development team in The Mythical Man Month and it included a toolmaker.
The estimate is that on average a parachute will fail one in a thousand times, mostly due to packing error, seldom due to equipment failure. Maybe 90/10 ratio.
For a reserve, the expectation is that they would fail less than one in 10,000 times they are deployed. Which means that, collectively, avoidable errors should only happen one in every million or so rides on a parachute. This is less often than the real observed rate (1 per 75k or so), but errors other than packing or equipment failure are often the root cause.
There's also a middle-ground available in the software industry: reading the code of the open-source tools you use. You can understand how your tools work without rebuilding them from scratch. Also, if you're using open-source (which most people do these days), the "cheaper" argument doesn't apply.
From what I understand every master craftsman has a small quantity of tools they either made themselves or at least modified to purpose. Tools with bits added on or ground off (eg, wrenches ground thin for tight spots, or magnetized).
I class jigs as a separate category but I have no handy parallel for software.
Craftsmanship matters and you just won't become an expert building exactly the number that you need for yourself.
But a side result is that you have a chance of actually understanding how your tools work, which is beneficial when developing new tools or when the tools stop working.
0. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/symbiartic/httpblogssci...
1. http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-caltech-glassbl...
2. https://news.usc.edu/114014/uscs-scientific-glassblower-lets...
Of course some departments adopt change faster than others, and some kinds of change are adopted more readily, so it's hard to make any sweeping generalizations.
Only if you didn't read the article.
"There's a city-specific reason why San Francisco has stuck with wood rather than swap over to metals, and the answer lies in looking up. The high-voltage cables and wires that guide the city's (oft-maligned) public transport system Muni, and trolley cars crisscross above nearly every street, mean that ladders made of conductive elements are generally just too dangerous to use."
They're nonconductive fiberglass.
They're stronger than wood, lighter than wood, don't need to be oiled/varnished, don't require cutting down old-growth trees, and aren't susceptible to moisture damage.
You can buy them exhaustively tested, mass produced, in whatever quantities you require for a couple hundred dollars - probably an order of magnitude less than these artisanal wooden ladders.
Did you read the comment you're replying to? I said very specifically "SF does have some good reasons for sticking with their wooden ladders". And note that I said "a somewhat significant factor" NOT "the only factor" or even "the biggest factor".
In fact, I did read the article, and I see nothing that contradicts the suggestion that tradition is "a somewhat significant factor" in their continued use of wooden ladders.
"We had one ladder here that was fully involved in a fire for 25 minutes, and the whole tip of it—six feet—was crispy. It looked like a log you pull out of a campfire," Braun says. "That can't go back in service but we were curious, so we put a new halyard [rope used to hoist ladders] on it for a load test. Even in that condition, it passed."
""Pete has collected all these different donuts over the years. They're all real, and covered with lacquer so they won't go bad. Some of these are ten years old.""