Salzburg Fire Marshal Interview

This meeting was the product of a chance encounter in the courtyard of Hohensalzburg, the big fortress that has stood above the city of Salzburg since 1200 a.d. Its looming presence seems to have been effective, since the only two incidents of aggression I am aware of are 1) a mob of angry farmers who stood in the fields to the south a few hundred years ago and yelled up at the high stone walls then dispersed, and 2) a single US bomb that fell directly through the dome of the cathedral in the last months of WWII. It took 15 years during the hard times that followed to rebuild the church where Mozart was the organist.

One of the Salzburg Fire Department's miniature fire trucks.

Anyway, three years ago I was in the courtyard with friends from California when a tiny diesel fire truck came chugging up the pedestrian pathway from the old city below. Since I had recently worked on a U. S. EPA-funded project for the Local Government Commission where narrow streets and small fire vehicles were at the core of our efforts, I grabbed my tape measure to get the dimensions.

While I was doing this the two firemen aboard opened the rear and helped a women in a nice evening dress out, followed by two men in suits. I overheard them commenting on a tourist sizing up a souvenir, so stepped over for an explanation. After I told them why the small truck interested me, one of the men said, “Ach! You mean narrow streets! I’m on the Salzburg Town Council and we have this same issue. You need to talk with my friend here the Fire Marshal.” So the Fire Marshal and I exchanged cards, made a date to talk later on my next trip over, and they proceeded to the reception they were attending on one of the terraces overlooking the old city. I imagine the taxi service the fire truck provided was logged as an “inspection” of the fire access route up to the fortress.

Inside the rear of the miniature fire truck.  The vehicle holds 4 men in the back, and two in the front.

This week, we finally got the chance to sit down with the Fire Marshal. After Emily and I had our Monday meetings in Munich, we grabbed our rental car and a quick lunch, rushed out to Petershausen to load up everything we had left at the Hausmaninger’s, and drove to Salzburg.

Fire Department headquarters is an impressive building, with two sets of ten doors facing a street on the “back” side of the huge rock the fortress sits on. Several stories of administrative offices and living quarters are on top of the garages, with more structures to the rear of a huge courtyard. After some confusion about getting through the security door we were greeted, and offered drinks in the meal room and kitchen complex until the Fire Marshal arrived.

In the Chief’s office, our discussion was fairly brief. We stayed focused on the street dimension issue and the strategies they have developed to deal with the sometimes quite narrow streets they have. Some passages are so narrow that the small truck I measured three years ago and some of the other trucks have dense wooden bumper boards on the sides.

The Salzburg Fire Department is one of only six (that is not a typo) “professional” fire departments in this entire country of nearly 8 million residents. Only the larger towns of Vienna, Graz, Linz, Salzburg, Innsbruck, and Klagenfurt have full-time funded staff. All the rest are volunteer departments operating on a small stipend basis. A skeleton crew (sometimes only a single person) staffs the station and the rest of the department members respond as needed. Salzburg, and I presume the other large city departments, does have trained volunteers that are called to service at times. I know from discussions with fire department volunteers in the Upper Austrian village of Sierning where I have spent so much time that serving as a volunteer is considered to be a great honor. I think the only service that comes close to this in the States is the National Guard, but I’m sad to think it does not carry the same level of respect.

One of the department's smallest fire trucks.

Street widths for the whole town are mapped in a system that codes access routes for different width vehicles when a fire is called in. So an initial fire call may trigger a response by one of the narrower trucks directly through small passageways. If it is determined that a ladder truck is necessary, that larger vehicle’s on-board information system will direct the driver to take a longer path on streets the truck fits through.

The fire access route up the pedestrian pathway is narrow and slow, and large trucks won’t fit at all. On a summer afternoon during the Mozart Festival (which seems to run from the first of July to June 30th) that route is completely clogged with tourists. So a couple of unusual strategies improve fire response up at the castle:

First, two Fire Department employees live in apartments up in the fortress, and at least one of them must be present at all times. Second, a large cache of fire equipment is staged in a room in the fortress to reduce the load on the small truck and eliminate multiple trips up and down. So by the time the smaller truck arrives with a crew of six, one or two fire personnel will already be on the attack with the equipment stored on site.

As with our Uniform Fire Code and other documents, there are national standards in Austria for street widths and set-up space. I will give more detail about this when we decipher the German-only national code (TVRB Technische Regulieren). We did learn, for example, that on new streets all access routes are to be a minimum of 3.5 meters wide. This is under 12 feet, considerably less than the standard that is often rigidly demanded in the States. 4 meters are required between or around the edge of structures, and they seek 6 meters clear for access to new buildings. (This is nearly identical to our 20 foot clear standard.) The only exception to this is for the temporary booths set up for Salzburg’s famous Christkindlmarkt, which has an extended schedule leading up to Christmas.

Soon the Fire Marshal had to go when most of the staff responded to a hotel fire near the Altstadt. We were turned over to an employee who gave us a verbal tour of the dozen or more fire vehicles (including one boat) that were in just one of the three garages at this complex.

As expected, these trucks are smaller than the typical US fire department fleet across the board. They tend to be specialized, but none has a single purpose. For example, one truck will carry the minimum fire response and first aid gear, but be designed to haul as many at ten personnel to a scene. Another may be devoted primarily to vehicle extraction equipment and supplies for injury treatment. A third will have a huge (and heavy) water tank, just a few people to run hoses, and little else.

There are two different sizes of water trucks. The large “pumper” has 2,000 gallons on board, and a dual-wheeled Sprinter van like our local FedEx driver has carries 1,000 gallons.
The small truck I first observed three years ago is a reduced-scale personnel hauler (6 passenger), with a minimum amount of water and gear aboard. Every effort is made to keep the weight and space required by the critical equipment this truck carries to a minimum. For example, there is no on-board pump to provide water pressure for the 50 gallon water tank the truck carries. Instead, an oversized SCUBA-like tank pressurizes the water tank with compressed air. Light and compact.

Here are some simple dimensions:

The Pinzgauer 6 passenger first response truck: 16 feet long including the 1 foot protrusion of the bumper-mounted winch, 83 inches feet tall, and 69 inches wide (84 inches to the outside of the folding mirrors).

The large ladder truck: Under 30 feet long, and just 84 inches wide without the mirrors. This was the largest truck on site, but it is a full foot narrower than the smallest we see in fire houses in the States.