Don't know about y'all, but there's no way I'd go in to attack a fire knowing that the pump on the other end of my line is running on batteries. I'm very much in support of moving away from fossil fuels where it makes sense, but this is one place it still doesn't. What about extended operations? Would a unit need to go OOS for an hour after returning from a job to get their rig's battery charged back up enough to be useful at the next job? At the very least I think you'd want a power connection for a pumper at every hydrant so that they're running on mains power. But then what if the job's a transformer fire and power on the block is out? Or what if the local youth decide to bring back the 70's next time there's a blackout?
I'm pretty unabashedly liberal, but this is the kinda crap that gives us a bad name. I could see electric NYPD patrol cars making sense given the lower power demands. Maybe even non-ALS busses could get by with electric, but that's ok until we get something like Sandy again that knocks out electricity to large parts of the city.
