Using Goal Programming to Locate a New Fire Hall

Firefighting has a long and illustrious history. The first to deal with firefighting equipment appears to have been Ctesibius of Alexandria (about 270 BC), who invented, among other things, a force pump (see Britannica (Encyclopedia Britannica, undated)), which could be used for fighting fires. His invention was pretty much forgotten afterwards, though. The ancient Roman empire also had its fire brigades that comprised thousands of slaves, who were responsible not only to fight fires, but also to enforce fire codes of the day. Nothing much is known about fighting fires in the Middle Ages. In the seventeenth Century in the New Word, Boston was the first to have firefighting co-ops, which comprised property owners, who vowed to help each other out in case of a fire. The first fire chief was Benjamin Franklin in about 1736 in Philadelphia, whose idea was to protect not just houses of the members of some co-op, but all houses (presumably since a fire in any of the wooden houses would spread quickly and thus endanger all of them). In 1699 François du Mouriez introduced some more modern equipment and provided a number of pumps in Paris. A century later, Napoleon Bonaparte established a segment of the army, the sapeur-pompiers, that was equipped with manual fire pumps. In 1824, the Scottish city of Edinburgh established its own fire department, to be followed by London 8 years later. Another important day occurred in 1853, when the city of Cincinnati created one of the first salaried fire department (CFD History, The Diary, undated). They were also frontrunners when it came to using a steam engine in their department. For an excellent account of the history of firefighting, see Fireserviceinfo (A Little Fire Service History, 2011). Figure 7.1 shows a manual pumper fire wagon from the 1860s.