The History of Fire Service - Essay Example

These are for example electrical fires, ordinary combustible fires, flammable liquids and gases among others (Rhodes, 2006). This paper is a critical evaluation of the history of fire service primarily in the US. Fire fighting is an activity which is believed to have existed immediately after the invention of fire by the early man. However, it is in Egypt that first attempts to mechanize the process are noted, with Ctesibus developing a hand held pump capable of producing a jet of water which was directed at the source of fire in an attempt to extinguish it (Smith, 1994).

During this period it is notable that there were no efficient mechanisms for fighting fire as most of the societies applied crude methods such as the use of buckets to throw water on fire, which produced little results as most of the efforts ended up salvaging none of the intended property. Apparently, the use of buckets involved people forming two parallel lines whereby one line was for passing buckets full of water from one person to the other up from the water source while the other involved the passing of the emptied buckets from one person to the other back to the water source (Jennes, 2010).

As it may seem, this was a tedious affair which exposed the said people i.e. bucket brigades to fatigue thereby reducing their productivity. Each bucket had its owner’s name written on it and as a measure to ensure sufficiency different categories of people were required by the authorities to possess a certain number of buckets depending on the potential risk of fire outbreak. Bakers for example were required to have at least three buckets while brewers had to have at least six buckets, which is as at the late 1600s (Jennes, 2010).

Most importantly, the people who worked as fire fighters, during this time, had no special skills acquired through training as most of them were volunteers from the society. The government, in this case US, had not instituted any systematic and