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A comment on Notre-Dame cathedral: Firefighters tackle blaze in Paris. Parent comment

Re:Notre-Dame cathedral: Firefighters tackle blaze in Paris by Animats on Monday April 15, 2019 @02:36PM (#19667663)
It's unlikely an urban fire department is set up for any significant amount of drafting (pulling water from surface sources), if it's something they can do at all.

SFFD trucks have that capability, and it was used in the 1989 earthquake. It's intended for pulling water from the underground cisterns marked by a big ring of bricks in SF intersections.

Terrible for the equipment to run salt water, but they had to.

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Re:Notre-Dame cathedral: Firefighters tackle blaze in Paris by lucb1e on Monday April 15, 2019 @05:57PM (#19669286)
I thought SFFD was some brand used by the French, but of course it's just USA-centric naming. (Took me forever to understand BART and I still have to look up name-based time zones like MST, which, no, thanks Wikipedia, is not Malaysia Standard Time at +8 but Mountain time at -7.)

For anyone else confused: this earthquake was in San Francisco and this is about their Fire Department. It doesn't mean that French fire trucks have that capability 30 years later.

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