Desperate to gain control of flames that were raging through Pacific Palisades last month, the Los Angeles Fire Department issued an urgent call for any available personnel to report for possible deployment.

But there was a problem: Dozens of the rigs that would have carried extra crews that day were out of service. The city maintenance yard was filled with aging fire engines and ladder trucks, many of which were beyond their expected

service life.

Chuong Ho, a firefighter and union leader who was among those who reported for work Jan. 7, said many of the firefighters who were available to help that day could not be sent to the front lines.

“We didn’t have a spot for them,” Ho said.

That breakdown, records show, was in part a result of the city’s failure to hire enough mechanics to keep the rigs in service. But there was also a deeper problem: For years, the fire truck industry had been ratcheting up prices on new rigs and failing to meet delivery dates of those that were ordered.

Some departments have waited years for replacement vehicles while hunting the internet for parts to keep their older rigs going.

Those problems have been compounded in recent years as Wall Street executives led an aggressive consolidation of the industry in a plan to boost profits from fire engine sales. One company, backed by a private-equity firm, cut its own manufacturing lines as part of a streamlining strategy and then saw a backlog of fire engine orders soar into billions of dollars.

The industry disruption has had effects well beyond Los Angeles — straining big cities like Atlanta and Seattle, and smaller ones, such as Watertown, New York, and Camden, New Jersey. Fire departments have expressed growing frustration with delayed deliveries and rising costs that are leaving them with dilapidated fleets that are more likely to break down, including some that have done just that during emergencies.

Industry officials say lingering labor shortages and supply chain problems that began during the coronavirus pandemic have led to manufacturing delays, but they also concede that the industry has consolidated in an effort to find efficiencies.

Edward Kelly, general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, said it’s clear that the pandemic brought on problems.

“But in hindsight, it was masking what ends up being a main driver of higher cost and lag time in production: the monopolizing of fire truck and ambulance manufacturing in the United States,” Kelly said. “At the end of the day, absent competition, monopoly capitalism is a shakedown.”

Gil Carpenter, a fire chief in Benton, Arkansas, said his department is facing steadily rising costs for new trucks. And suppliers who were once responsive, he said, have grown more distant and focused on profits.

“When is enough enough?” Carpenter asked. “And at what point are you going to sacrifice public safety for profits?”

Industry consolidation

The fire engine industry was once made up of small local manufacturers, many of whom built dozens or hundreds of trucks each year. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, some of those companies were struggling to stay afloat.

Wall Street investment firms saw an opportunity to buy these troubled firms for low prices and combine them. In 2006, a midsize private-equity firm, American Industrial Partners, decided to create one large company out of a collection of small specialty vehicle businesses. They bought up fire truck companies, as well as those making ambulances, school buses, street sweepers and recreation vehicles and combined them into a company called REV Group. They took it public in 2017 but retained control over all operating decisions and who would serve on the board.

The plan they articulated to shareholders was to make the companies more efficient — and a lot more profitable. Timothy Sullivan, REV Group’s CEO, told analysts at the time that the companies they were acquiring were operating with a profit margin of 4% to 5% and that they were on a path “to get all of them above that 10% level.”

“You bring them into the fold, you got to give them the religion, and they’ve got it now,” he said.

Other companies were adopting a similar model, Sullivan said, including Pierce Manufacturing, a division of Oshkosh Corp. that recently sold many vehicles to the Los Angeles Fire Department.

REV Group now controls as much as 30% of the fire truck market, according to industry estimates the company cites. Together, the industry’s three largest companies — REV Group, Oshkosh and Rosenbauer — control 70% to 80% of the market.

High profits, long delays

After going public, REV Group bought up two more key fire truck makers, Spartan and Ferrara, but found it hard to find streamlining efficiencies.

One problem is that there is little room for automation in the industry, said Mike Virnig, who serves as president of the REV division that manufactures fire trucks. Unlike the automobile industry, fire departments buy trucks every 10 to 15 years on average and have incredibly specific requests, so most trucks are bespoke vehicles.

The pandemic caused global supply chain issues that made it difficult to acquire parts at the same time that fire departments, which were receiving an influx of federal, state and local COVID-19 stimulus grants, started buying new trucks at a pace not seen in more than a decade. Truck manufacturers struggled to find workers.

But the streamlining efforts also had an effect. REV Group closed two plants in 2021 — one in Pennsylvania, one in Virginia — cutting the company’s manufacturing footprint by roughly one-third.

Along the way, wait times soared. Before the pandemic, REV Group had a backlog of about $1 billion worth of fire department orders that were expected to take a year to 18 months to fulfill. That has since jumped to $4 billion worth of orders that they estimate will take two to three years to deliver.

Still, REV Group’s profit margins jumped to what they described as an “exceptional 8.9%” for the division that includes fire trucks in 2024. That same year, its longtime backer and owner, American Industrial Partners, sold nearly all of its shares, but before doing so awarded a special dividend of $180 million of which nearly $80 million went to AIP.

REV Group wasn’t alone in order delays. Oshkosh said its backlog of fire truck orders has increased dramatically, quadrupling from 2019 to 2023, when it reported around $4 billion in orders placed but not fulfilled.

Troubles in Los Angeles

In Los Angeles, records show that the city’s fire department has long aimed to have 90% of its fleet ready for deployment at any given time but has averaged only 78% in recent years. The department has requested about $100 million for fleet replacement.

“Many vehicles have surpassed their expected service life, leading to increased maintenance costs, reduced parts availability and potential downtime,” the department wrote in a budget proposal a month before the January wildfires.

The firefighters union has been concerned about equipment shortages for a while. Department officials said current build times for new trucks range from two to four years, in part because of supply delays that began during the pandemic.

“The checks and balances within the city’s procurement system can pose challenges to the timely acquisition of apparatus,” the department said in a statement.

Union officials said their own research showed that four ordered trucks had not been delivered and that a steep rise in prices was also a problem.

Ladder trucks that cost $1.3 million only a few years ago now cost about $2.3 million, Ho said. The soaring costs have forced the department to order fewer rigs than originally planned.

Kristin Crowley, the fire chief in Los Angeles who was fired Friday by LA’s mayor, has said that about 100 fire vehicles were out of service in January, a situation that impeded the department’s ability to respond to the Palisades Fire. Ho said that included about 40 engines and 10 ladder trucks that were out of service, along with about 40 other vehicles, such as ambulances.

In the months prior, the LAFD requested that the city restore 16 positions focused on supply and maintenance that had been removed from the department’s budget. Ho said the department had also faced challenges acquiring parts for aging vehicles, at times going on the internet to find replacement components.

The fire truck industry, unlike the auto industry, has never been standardized, so cities typically buy a truck where almost every part is specialized for the needs of the fire department and the specific landscape and population it serves. This is partly because only about 10,000 fire trucks are manufactured each year.

To help keep down costs, REV Group has created a more standardized vehicle that can be made in less than a year. If more fire departments choose this standardized model, it is likely that overall wait times will drop, said Virnig, the REV Group executive.

Virnig said he believed the industry could return to more normalized manufacturing timelines of 12 to 18 months within a few years.

“I’d say it’s going to take us a couple of years to work through this bubble again,” he said.