China will send fire trucks for $100,00 to $400,000, and the turnaround time is 45 days. Delivery is another 3 to 6 weeks. Fire Departments in the United States are paying five times as much, and it takes more than four years for delivery.
Prices for ladder trucks have jumped from $750,000–$900,000 in the mid-2010s to around $2 million today, while pumper trucks now often cost over $1 million.
This has gone on for years. They also cannot obtain replacement parts.
Reportedly, private equity firms are doing it deliberately to generate more profits. Senators are now probing companies over the costs and delays.
The bipartisan investigation by US Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Jim Banks (R-Ind.) was prompted by widespread complaints from fire departments detailing delayed deliveries, faulty components, and rapidly escalating prices.
During the recent Palisades wildfires, over 100 of the Los Angeles Fire Department’s 183 trucks were out of service, a situation exacerbated by aging fleets and skyrocketing vehicle costs.
“Private equity is padding shareholders’ wallets at the expense of public safety,” the senators wrote in their letter to the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF), highlighting the urgent need to understand the role financial investors are playing in the critical public safety industry.
The NY Times:
Over the past two decades, the private equity firm American Industrial Partners has acquired a number of specialty vehicle companies, including fire truck manufacturers, and has combined them into a single company called Rev Group. Company executives told analysts that they would substantially raise profit margins and that other companies were doing the same. Rev Group closed two manufacturing plants to streamline its operations.
…
Industry leaders have said that the delays and rising prices stemmed from disruptions brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, but some fire officials have blamed the problems at least partly on the industry’s consolidation.
If accurate, this is a scandalous state of affairs, or it’s the result of the Democrat pandemic policies.
It’s hard to believe anything from the New York Times or that Elizabeth Warren backs is accurate. However, Jim Banks is reliable.
If they are corrupt and forming monopolies, they need to be stopped.
In any case, our firefighters are unable to get the vehicles they need to protect us from fires.
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