SHREVEPORT, La. (KSLA) – The Shreveport Fire Department says the microchip and supply chain shortage is affecting their ability to get staff vehicles and parts to repair some fire trucks.
“We are facing some heartache there and some hardships. We bought vehicles at the beginning of this year [2021] in February, they didn’t come in until December. So, that’s caused a delay in replacing some aging apparatus. It’s caused those units to be in reserve more because of things breaking down. So, we are facing some challenges and having to look at different ways of dealing with those challenges,” said SFD Chief of Special Operations and Safety Charles “Skip” Pinkston.
Another challenge Pinkston said his department has is delayed car parts. Pinkston said although fire trucks do not depend on microchips, parts are needed for repairs.
“Parts is a tremendous issue, just the supply chain in general. We have some trucks that have a 90-120 day lead time on getting those parts in,” added Pinkston.
Experts said there are a couple reasons for the delays and shortages.
“We don’t have a nice flow of ships coming to and from countries like China that can provide us with microchips. So, we have a shortage of microchips because of production issues and that is worsened by those ships that are available, we’re just having trouble getting them to the US factories,” said Centenary College Economics Professor David Hoaas.
Pinkston added that the shortage should not impact their response time to calls.
We can assure our response times won’t be significantly delayed enough to have a major effect. We’ll staff firefighters in those stations…it just may be a different type of vehicle responding to the call,” he said.
Right now, SFD is having to make due with what they have.
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