Here's what I recieved from my bro-in-law.
Hey Russ,
Yes, you are correct, hose towers have become obsolete. The reason being is that the fire hose that we used when I first came on the job was cotton jacketed rubber hose with heavy brass couplings. It was a real b___h to haul up and down the staircases in the old tenements. When it got wet, it's weight doubled. It had to be dried out after each use, so we would haul it up into the hose tower when we got back to the firehouse. You could not pack this hose if it was wet.
Today's firehose is made of a polyester material with lightweight aluminum alloy hose couplings. When it gets wet, we can simply repack it on to the rig and it will not rot from mildew like the old stuff.
The city was putting hose dryers in the firehouses after they stopped building hose towers, but with the newer hose, they are not used that often either. They looked like giant pizza ovens.
The hose towers were always in the rear of the building. When you backed the rig into quarters, the hose bed on the rear of the pumper could be unloaded directly into the hose tower. We would take the dry stuff out as we loaded the wet stuff in.
The guys coming on the job today wouldn't have a clue of how to haul and hang the hose like we had to. That cold and drafty hose tower was the last place you wanted to be after returning from a multiple alarm fire on a winter night. The hose was hauled up from the male end and suspended on brass hooks that latched around the lugs on the male coupling. You couldn't hang from the female end because you would damage the swivel from all the weight being suspended from it.
Hope that was informative.
