Our feature OKI Wanna Know answers the call when you have a question no one else can help with. This time, the alarm is sounded for fire engines. WVXU's Bill Rinehart explains.
Sarah Henry of Mount Washington writes, "How did the fire engines wind up with their numbers? It seems like they might have gotten them in order of founding, but Clifton (an older one) is 34. Or perhaps they were numbered by location, but Engine 7 is in Mount Washington while Engine 8 is all the way in Pleasant Ridge."
It's not just fire engines. It's fire stations, and fire companies. And that's the key word, according to Brian Doering: companies. Doering is a Cincinnati firefighter/paramedic, and he helps out at the Cincinnati Fire Museum. He says firefighting was once a for-profit venture.
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"When those guys would show up they would have a certain dress about them that would have been very flamboyant and noticeable," he says. "And that way, when they put out your business fire you would give something to the Eagle Fire Company, and you knew it because they all wore this weird thing. They all had checkered pants or something like that."
Clients, often insurance companies, could subscribe to a fire company, guaranteeing a response. Fire companies knew who their clients were because of a badge, or seal, stuck to the outside of the building. Doering says with any business venture, competition was to be expected.
"The fire departments, the individual companies would show up, but when you're not going to get paid — like you don't have bread on your table, you can't feed your kids — what would happen is they would fight," Doering says. "They would show up in the front yard, and we're just going to fight and whosever is tired of fighting is going to leave, and we'll put the fire out, whosever left."
Doering says there's a story about one company pushing another company's apparatus into the Miami and Erie Canal so they couldn't respond to any fire.
"Finally, Cincinnati specifically was like, 'This seems silly. We should all be on the same team. And then when the insurance company who put that seal on pays us, we'll just all take a portion of that,' " he says. "But the city itself was going to pay these guys to be firemen all the time."
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And thus began the first, full-time, fully paid professional fire department in the country.
Doering says some traditions have stuck around, like the spirit of competition between Cincinnati's firefighters when multiple companies are dispatched to the same incident.
"The 3's and the 5's that are Downtown will race to be at the fire first, because historically, that's what they did. They'd never given up that historical practice of doing it," he says. "So there's a lot of company pride there that 'Hey, we have to be first. Why? Well, because historically, this was ours. We were supposed to make it first.' "
The numbering system springs from a tradition, too. Doering says when private companies gave up their individual names, like the Eagle Fire Company, they got a number.
This is where the numbering system gets complicated.
"You had smaller companies or fire departments that were largely volunteer even up until the '90s and even some today, that are in Hamilton County that didn't have a number per se, but because they're the only fire department for the Village of Golf Manor, they're just Engine 1, because they're the only engine in Golf Manor."
Doering says that worked OK, until radio communications came along. He says the FCC required every radio user to have a call-sign. So, several different departments could have an Engine 2, or a Truck 1.
"That went away. In the '90s, they made everybody — in alphabetical order believe it or not — adopt a number," he says. "So Addyston for example was a volunteer fire company. They were Number 1. Well, then they went to the city and said 'You guys kind of have first dibs because of your traditional numbers. Which ones do you want?' "
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Doering says Cincinnati stuck with the numbers the companies already had, so today, Cincinnati has Engine 2, Ladder 2, and Medic 2 at Station 2 in Carthage, and so on.
"They'd go over to the county and say 'What's the next alphabetical number? Well, it's Amberley Village. So now they're Number 4.' And they'd go 'Number Five? No, that belongs to the city, so 5's off the table,' " he says. "And that's how we came up with what we have now, and it's also why we have found ourselves in the triple digits, because those fire departments keep growing in number."
For instance, today Colerain has stations 26, and 102. Delhi Township's department has three stations: 30, 33, and 36. Green Township has the numbers 53, 54, 55, and 107. He says as new fire stations are built, and companies organized to staff them, the numbers will continue to go higher.
