AKRLTW said:
Visibility? That's a flat non-argument!
It's really not more visible anyway in any situation that actually matters. You're not responding or even parking anywhere where you need visibility, without your equipment on to enhance your visibility and recognition (lights stationary, lights and siren mobile) and giving people working on the trucks headaches due to fuglypaint is just a disservice to your staff.
I'd rather have a truck that looked good in the daytime and relied on a proper package of passive reflective striping to enhance the signature and overall footprint from active emergency lighting for nighttime, than a pile of steel and aluminum painted the color of what you cough up when you have the flu.
I love these arguments! I ride slime-lime fire engines at work, and chrome yellow at my volunteer station. Allow me to give an opposing view....
When my VFD was incorporated in 1970, we wanted to stand out from the rest of the departments in the area. A neighboring career department sold us three rigs for $500 (total!) and one of them was yellow. The founding members liked the idea, and 42 years later, we still proudly run white-over-yellow apparatus with no plans to change. Yeah, we still chuckle at the "gonna leave yer far truck outside so it'll ripen up?" jokes from other departments as though we've never heard such an original joke, but the paint is part of who we are, and we're proud of that.
Now at work, we got our first lime rig when Ward LaFrance partnered with Dr. Steven Soloman (Google him) on his conspicuously studies in 1973. 40 years later, we still have the slime rigs. Why? It's part of our branding. There are the "big three" fire departments in the area (each with 20 stations and about 500 members) - one has red/white, one has yellow/white, and we have the lime green. Our departments get along superbly, but we each have our identity through our rolling $500,000 billboards. Sure, some members would like red fire apparatus, but we work for a great department with good pay, nice apparatus, and excellent promotional opportunities, so the paint isn't really such a big deal.
Whether or members like our lime paint job or not, it's pretty widely accepted in our department that our rigs are easy to see. They don't blend in with the background very often, they're bright, big, and different.
Ah well, to each their own. I think that we'd have a pretty bland American fire service if everyone used red, red/white, or the latest red/black craze that sweeping the US. I'm glad I come from a state where I can find dark blue, kelly green, bright orange, white, yellow, lime, light blue, and black fire apparatus!
