Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Department
fire department in Jacksonville, Florida, United States
The Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Department (JFRD) provides fire protection and emergency medical services for Jacksonville, Florida, as well as all unincorporated areas of Duval County.
According to a list of the thirty largest fire departments in the United States, based on staff size, JFRD is number eighteen.
Duval County has the fifth largest fire department in the state based on the number of fire stations. JFRD is among the largest departments in the state and the nation. The department is made up of six divisions, sixty-three fire and rescue station locations, a professional career force of roughly thirteen-hundred individuals.
History
In Jacksonville's early days, citizens responded to fires by forming formed bucket brigades. In 1852, Jacksonville upgraded its firefighting apparatus with the acquisition of a hand pumper. The wheeled pumper had large handles on each side, which were pumped up and down in a seesaw manner to create hydraulic pressure. On April 5, 1854, the hand pumper was put to the test when a spark from the paddle steamer Florida ignited a fire at the docks along Bay Street between Ocean and Newnan. The pumper proved no match for the conflagration, which destroyed the pumper along with 70 buildings, devastating Jacksonville's business district.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Department” as fire department in Jacksonville, Florida, United States. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as fire department in Jacksonville, Florida, United States. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 30, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q16987808. Authority coordinates are 30.337, -81.661. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1852 and 1854.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Department” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.