America is running out of fire trucks

GAINESVILLE, Fla. (InvestigateTV) - Across the country, fire departments are waiting years for new trucks.

The trucks they already have are breaking down with no replacement parts available. Communities are losing fire protection entirely, and the price of a single fire engine has risen 64% in four years.

The shortage is real. It is national. And it is getting worse.

Not long ago, ordering a fire truck was predictable. A chief would place an order and, roughly a year later, the truck would arrive.

“Before 2020, the fire chiefs of North America could fairly accurately know how long it was going to take,” said Jason Shivers, division chief of Forsyth County Fire Department in metro Atlanta and chair of the International Association of Fire Chiefs’ emergency vehicle management section. “You could expect to get a fire engine in about 12 months, maybe 14, maybe 16. That was consistent for many years before the pandemic.”

Then it wasn’t.

Four years. Sometimes five.

The pandemic didn’t just disrupt fire truck manufacturing. It shattered it. Supply chains slowed and plants temporarily shut down. Parts stopped arriving. Fire departments, watching delivery windows stretch from months into years, did what any rational manager would do: they ordered more trucks, sooner, to get ahead of the backlog.

It made everything worse.

“Today, unfortunately, an order may take up to four years, sometimes five years,” Shivers said.

Nate Bailey, president of the Atlanta Professional Firefighters union, said the delays putting the lives of firefighters and residents in danger. “If we can build a Super Bowl stadium in two years, why can’t we build a fire truck in two years?,” Bailey asked, rhetorically. “It shouldn’t take three to four years to get a lifesaving piece of equipment in the cities across this country.”

Harold Theus, fire chief of Alachua County Fire Rescue in north-central Florida, knows exactly what that feels like. His department ordered ambulances in January 2022. They still haven’t arrived.

Alachua County sits less than an hour’s drive from E-One, one of the nation’s largest fire apparatus manufacturers, and Alachua County’s preferred nameplate.

They’re neighbors, but it still takes years to get a truck, ”about a two-and-a-half year turnaround time," Theus said, “from the time we cut the purchase order until the time we take delivery.”

The wait would be painful enough. But the cost has become its own emergency.

In 2022, a fire engine cost Alachua County Fire Rescue roughly $550,000. By December 2025, that same engine — essentially unchanged — cost $915,000, a 64% increase in four years.

Shivers said the new national price floor for a pumper is at least $1 million.

“I keep thinking we’ve hit the ceiling,” Theus said. “I don’t know where the ceiling is. For the taxpayer, it needs to be soon.”

The fire service didn’t just endure this crisis. In a significant way, it helped create it.

When delivery times started stretching, fire chiefs across the country responded by ordering more trucks, earlier, to stay ahead of the line. Multiplied across thousands of departments, the result was a flood of orders that overwhelmed manufacturers already struggling to keep up.

“The chiefs of America have been part of the problem,” Shivers said. “The natural reaction was to say, ‘If I’ve got to wait that long, maybe I need to double that order. Maybe I need to triple that order.’ It’s cyclical. And we’ve aggravated the problem because of the number of orders we’ve tried to put in to get ahead of the next guy.”

250 years of tradition, unimpeded by progress

To understand why the crisis deepened, you have to understand the culture.

“Firefighters hate two things: change and the way things are,” Shivers said. “We are very, very stuck in the tradition of the fire service. We are very proud of being stuck in the tradition of the fire service.”

For generations, that tradition meant ordering trucks built precisely to a department’s specifications, down to the exact shade of red. The customization isn’t always vanity. Muscle memory matters when you’re pulling hose in the dark at 2 a.m. after a 90-second commute from a dead sleep.

But it also created a manufacturing system structurally incapable of scaling quickly. Fire trucks aren’t built on assembly lines. They’re built by hand — artisans, Shivers called them — each one unique to the department that ordered it. When COVID hit that system, there was no surge capacity. The backlog grew. The wait times grew with it.

The question facing fire chiefs is no longer abstract: do you wait years for the truck you want, or take the truck available now?

Forsyth County has chosen both, simultaneously. Shivers has purchased stock trucks off dealer lots, bought a demo ladder truck coming off a manufacturer’s tour circuit, and enrolled in a dealer-allocated stock program delivering semi-custom trucks in roughly 12 months instead of four years. One purchase happened in a single afternoon.

“A salesman came by, said he had a stock truck that just came in,” Shivers said. “I told the president of the company, ‘I want it.’ He called the boss. He said, ‘Order it. Get it. Sign for it.’ And that’s what we did. If you didn’t buy that truck, another fire department would have within days or weeks. Maybe hours.”

Theus made the same pivot at Alachua County, reluctantly, but decisively. Seven stock ambulances, 12-month delivery, instead of four years. He’s still waiting on the custom ambulances, too.

“We did have to give some things up,” Theus said. “But we were in a situation where we didn’t have enough ambulances on the road.”

Before the verdict tips too far, the chiefs themselves push back. Some customization isn’t tradition. It’s physics.

Theus pointed to the front bumper of one of his engines, fitted with e-hydraulic extrication equipment mounted so crews can pull up to a crash and immediately begin cutting.

“That is a custom build that we have,” Theus said. “That saves seconds, because you’re not going back to an equipment bay on the truck.”

Keith Durden, a fire apparatus service technician with more than 35 years in the industry offered the example of Charleston, South Carolina, where the historic district’s narrow alleyways make a standard fire truck physically impossible to deploy.

“A stock truck is not going to fit down that alley in Charleston, South Carolina,” Durden said, “and there’s no other way to get to that house that’s on fire.”

The honest version of this story isn’t “custom bad, stock good.” Some customization saves lives, some ensures operational safety, and some — the exact shade of red — is pride. In a crisis, the fire service is being forced, for the first time in a generation, to figure out which is which.

A problem worth fixing — if you can get the parts

The shortage of new trucks is the headline. But Durden, who travels the country — and the world — servicing fire apparatus, describes a downstream crisis that has received almost no attention: the trucks already in service are failing, and in many cases there are no parts to fix them.

“There are fire trucks on the road right now that if a part fails, there isn’t a replacement part still manufactured or in stock,” Durden said.

He described a fire truck instrument panel manufactured for only a single model year — because the original component wasn’t available — leaving those trucks with no replacement dash cluster when they need one.

In the Caribbean, Durden said, two fire trucks are currently sitting idle, while he waits on a part that hasn’t arrived, leaving communities without full fire protection.

“There are two fire trucks in the Caribbean that are sitting there, not on the street, because they’re waiting on a part,” he said. “The reason I’m not there right now is because the part’s not there.”

Manufacturing a stock price?

Durden spent more than a decade on the production floor at E-One before the company was absorbed into REV Group — a private equity-backed conglomerate that, as InvestigateTV previously reported, now controls multiple major fire apparatus brands. Alongside Oshkosh Corporation and Rosenbauer, three companies control roughly 80% of the U.S. fire truck market according to congressional testimony.

A US Senate investigation in September 2025 found those companies tripled their profit margins — from 4-5% before consolidation to more than 13% today — while departments waited years for trucks and prices climbed.

Our investigators reported on a 2025 apartment building fire in Chicago in which four people died. The lieutenant on the first-due ladder truck — a 24-year-old reserve unit — said the aerial failed, costing about a minute while people were waiting to be rescued from third floor windows in the burning building.

Durden, who watched the transformation of the fire truck industry from the inside, said the shift in priorities is visible.

“I’m looking more at a stock price from the corporate level,” Durden said. “When you’re a corporate-sized business, you’re trying to produce a widget. Your job is to make sure we’re making money off the widget. That’s where they sometimes lose that connection between your customer and the actual mission of the company.

“That truck may be coming to your house at 2 o’clock in the morning to put out a fire, or it may be coming to rescue your mother or your father who have fallen,” he said. “That should be the number one reason to be in this business.”

One broken truck away

Tariffs on parts sourced from Canada, Mexico, and overseas are now layered on top of everything else, threatening to push prices and delays even higher, Durden said.

In Alachua County, Theus is watching the math play out in real time. His lone ladder truck — a 2009 Quint that should have been retired in 2024 — remains in frontline service because its replacement won’t arrive until January 2027. On the days it goes down, there is no backup.

Asked if his ladder company responds without a ladder on those days, Theus said, “without aerial device? Yes, we do.”

Small departments across Florida are folding entirely, absorbed by counties barely keeping their own fleets running. Theus said smaller departments in Alachua County alone are on the edge.

“We have a couple of them here that are either a broken-down fire engine or a wrecked fire engine away from being out of service,” Theus said. “It’s going to continue to have a domino effect throughout the industry.”

There is cautious optimism. Manufacturers are catching up, and delivery times are beginning to shorten. The IAFC is pushing a longer-term fix: standardized specifications for urban, suburban, and rural apparatus that manufacturers could build to scale, reducing the one-at-a-time model that makes the industry so vulnerable.

After 30 years in the fire service, Theus has already made his call.

“Stock rescues (ambulances) are ... going to be the route we take,” he said. “The same is going to follow with engines. If you’re looking at not having fire engines, you’ve got to have something in service.”

Durden thinks the system will find its footing. Eventually.

“Within maybe three years, we’re probably going to be going back into a more normal situation,” he said.

Until then, departments say, the pressure keeps building, one broken truck at a time.