Fifteen years ago, to trim the budget, New York pulled one firefighter off most of its fire engines. This spring, with fire deaths in the city running at nearly double last year’s pace, the City Council is trying to put that firefighter back, and the history of the cut is hard to read as anything but a warning.
The idea is simple. A fifth firefighter means staffing an engine company with five instead of four, which supporters say lets a crew get water on a fire faster and keeps a small fire from becoming a deadly one. The Uniformed Firefighters Association backs it, and the position has a pointed history: it was cut under Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2011, dropping most engines from five firefighters to four.
What remained got smaller from there. Only about 20 of the city’s roughly 200 engine companies still carry a fifth firefighter, a remnant Mayor Bill de Blasio restored at the busiest houses. Mayor Eric Adams tried to cut even those, days before the 2022 Twin Parks fire in the Bronx killed 17 people, the deadliest in the city in decades.
Now the push is to expand it. Council Speaker Julie Menin is pressing the Mamdani administration to put about $92 million in the next budget to add a fifth firefighter to 86 engine companies, roughly half the fleet, and the UFA and Councilmember Joann Ariola want 40 of those positions sent to the Bronx, the busiest borough for fires. The urgency is grim: 51 people have died in fires across the city this year, nearly double the figure at the same point in 2025.
That is the uncomfortable arithmetic at the center of it. The fifth firefighter was removed as a line item, a way to save money on paper, and the case for bringing it back is being made in deaths, with the Twin Parks timing hanging over every budget meeting. Whether the $92 million goes in is a choice about what a faster first hose is worth.
The decision lands with the city budget, which has to be adopted by July 1. If you have a view on it, the Council’s budget hearings this June are where the fifth-firefighter money is either written in or left out, and your council member is the person voting on it.
Featured image: Oleg Yunakov / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
