These firefighters just wanted to save lives. Private equity had other ideas

This past Valentine’s Day, a firefighter behind the wheel of an enormous ladder truck felt his brakes give out.

He was driving in the heart of Chicago, on a busy city street, about to lose control of a truck that was supposed to help him save people’s lives. He looked around, panicked. The 25-year-old truck — and the nightmare — picked up speed.

He had three choices: drive into traffic, hit a local grammar school, or plow into the side of a church on the corner. He swerved, narrowly avoiding a pole, and picked the church.

“It was pretty tragic,” says Pat Cleary, president of the Chicago Fire Fighters Union Local 2. “We were just happy no one got injured.”

It wouldn’t be the last time something like this happened to one of the departments’ 96 rigs. Weeks later, another truck dropped a rear axle responding to a medical emergency. And in January, the department threw a mock 30th birthday for one of its trucks — it was older than many firefighters on the force.

A birthday cake celebrating D545’s 30th birthday. (Chicago Fire Department/Facebook)

For years, the Chicago fire department has struggled to repair and replace its aging fleet of trucks, the priciest of which now come at a cost of $2m+.

And it’s not just in Chicago: Across the fire truck industry, increased consolidation has led to spikes in demand, production delays and sky-high prices, leaving departments nationwide scrambling to provide life-saving services to their citizens.

“There’s a monopoly in the business. They’re taking over,” Cleary says. “Civilians are going to suffer.”

How did we get here?

Emergency vehicles didn’t start out as the custom builds driving down our streets today.

Back in the 1950s, they were largely just trucks outfitted with special add-ons — ladders, pumps — to differentiate them from the vehicle that might deliver your furniture. Family-owned businesses sprung up across the country to serve a region’s specific needs, and competition kept prices low.

Olivia Heller/The Hustle

Fast forward 60 years, and those businesses were contending with aging founders, depleted municipal budgets, and declining fire-truck orders. Sensing an opportunity, a private equity group called American Industrial Partners (AIP) began to roll up the industry.

Wait: what’s a roll up? It’s when a company buys up a spate of smaller businesses and merges them together to create a conglomerate.

AIP took its bundle and called it the REV Group, now one of the three leading manufacturers of fire trucks in the U.S. REV captures about a third of the country’s $3B in annual fire truck sales, with runner-up Oshkosh reporting revenue of $767m (~26%) and Rosenbauer International at $254m (~9%).

After AIP’s acquisitions, the company closed some manufacturing plants. They encouraged brands to share designs, limiting available options. And in the meantime, exacerbated by COVID, the production bottleneck grew, which gave the companies more control over prices and supply.

What has that meant for the industry?

• Rising prices: by the mid-2010s, the average engine truck cost $300k to $500k. Today, they cost more than $1m. Ladder trucks, now mostly built custom, are even more expensive: as high as $2m.
• Production backlogs: New vehicles are taking two to 4.5 years from order to delivery.
• Shifting contracts: “Here’s the real crime: now they have what they call floating prices,” says Ed Kelly, general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF). Because of production backlogs, companies have included clauses in contracts that mean they can change the price of an order long after it’s been placed.

The result has left departments across the country struggling. In 2023, Evanston, Illinois, spent $2.3m on their latest rig to replace an 18-year-old reserve truck. Storm Lake, in Iowa, recently committed $2.8m over ten years to replace a ladder truck that’s 35 years old. When an audit last year found Atlanta firefighters were using pick-up trucks because so many of their rigs were out of service, the city earmarked $18m to bolster its fleet.

When Ann Arbor, Michigan, approved spending $2.4m on a new truck, the fire chief told reporters: “the price of fire trucks has become bonkers.”

It also means fire departments are now competing against one another for the vehicles, leaving municipalities and the public to pay the price.

The Hustle

In January, as wildfires ravaged L.A., its fire chief appeared on national news to explain that 100+ of its ~200 fire trucks were sitting out of commission on a nearby lot. They’d fallen into disrepair, or were too old to keep on the road, and the department couldn’t afford to fix or replace them.

Later that month, Texas anti-trust lawyer Basel Musharbash asked “Did a private equity fire truck roll-up worsen the L.A. fires?”, and it thrust an issue departments across the country were contending with into the national conversation.

Brothers helping brothers

Nick Magoteaux, a retired Ohio firefighter who runs Brothers Helping Brothers (BHB), an organization that raises money and donates equipment to small and rural fire departments across the U.S., sees how detrimental the shift in prices has been, particularly on volunteer departments without the funding of bigger municipalities.

In the U.S., ~70% of fire departments are volunteer-run.

“Our department was pretty strapped for cash. A lot of times we’d be trying to make ends meet, trying to find equipment for our team,” he says. When his friend and fellow firefighter, Art Springer, passed away, he founded BHB in his honor.

Consolidation is affecting the entire fire industry, from dispatch software to PPE. (Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images)

Magoteaux serves departments that typically have budgets of under $100k/year, and says that the grants those teams once relied on now seem increasingly uncertain as government cuts persist. Instead of buying new, he says, many of those departments are turning to used trucks that cost between $50k and $200k. (The National Fire Protection Association guidelines say fire trucks should be no more than 15 years old.)

But it’s a patchwork solution that tends to end the same way: with a department taking out hundreds of thousands in financing to fund a new rig.

“Every department is facing these issues,” he says. “Departments are struggling.”

Olivia Heller/The Hustle

And, he says, it’s not just trucks that are being affected. Dispatch software, vehicle parts and repairs, and personal protective equipment manufacturing are all being consolidated, leading to rising prices and scarcity across the industry.

Anti-trust action?

Ed Kelly was one of those kids who always dreamed of being a firefighter. As a boy, he looked up to his grandfather, father, and uncle who all did the job.

Today, in addition to his work at Boston’s Fire Department, he’s the general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF).

He sees the issue from the board room and on the ground working shifts at the fire station.

In Boston, for example, Kelly says they’ve run out of spare fire trucks to swap in when an apparatus ages out, so they’ve taken to riding around in pickup trucks with masks, hoses, and ladders piled in the back.

“If you’re hanging out the window on the fifth floor, we can’t get you on a ground ladder,” he says. “You’re jumping.”

A rig responds to a wildfire in the Pacific Palisades in January 2025. (Photo by Jason Ryan/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Back in May, the IAFF co-authored a strongly worded letter to the Department of Justice, alongside the American Economic Liberties Project, urging them to investigate what it called an aggressive consolidation effort over the last decade.

Kelly says they’ve seen some progress: Senator Elizabeth Warren got on board, and so did Senator Josh Hawley across the aisle, sending a letter requesting more information from the big three manufacturers.

REV Group told The Hustle that inflation, COVID backlogs, and labor shortages have all contributed to rising prices and increased demand.

Orders were up 43% from 2011 to 2023, a REV Group spokesperson pointed out, and they’ve introduced new training and modular build options to lessen the load. “Our team has worked hard to overcome these obstacles and are making good progress,” she said.

In the meantime, departments from Atlanta to Seattle to Los Angeles are contending with fleets that threaten to endanger the firefighters and the public they aim to serve.

“The industry will say, ‘Oh, it’s all supply chain,’” Kelly says.

“That’s all B.S. It’s about consolidation.”