Now for some about the Fire Rescue Service (FRS) of which I'm a member.

The Country Fire Authority (CFA) of Victoria is the organisation responsible for fire and other emergencies for most of the State. We only have one really large city, Melbourne. The FRS for the CBD and about 50% of the suburbs is the all career Metropolitan Fire and Emergency Services Board - like long names, don't we? So we call it the MFB. The CFA covers the rest of the suburbs plus all the provincial cities, towns and farmland of the State. For the National Parks and State Forests we have a third government fire service (stand by for long name) the Department of Sustainability and Environment - the DSE. Years ago it was just called the Forest Commission, much better. The two major airports are covered by a Federal Govt service; the Armed Forces bases by a private contractor and the larger private forest plantations by private Industry Brigades that come under the control of the CFA. Phew, that's enough for one State!
OK. The CFA. Made up of 1200+ individual Fire Brigades, with some of the busier urban risk brigades having a mixture of volunteer and career firefighters. Overall we have around 60,000 volunteers and 600 career. Each Brigade has at least one government issued vehicle and many (most) at least one Brigade owned vehicle. All vehicles are totally under the control of the Authority. Dispatch is centrally controlled (two CAD centres) and is by alpha numeric pager.
What types of vehicle do we use? Two main types. One that we call a ‘tanker’, that is an urban/rural fire fighting vehicle, not a water carting vehicle, that is equipped to meet the risk profile of the Brigade. The areas with a high urban risk have a ‘pumper’ fitted with a larger capacity pump than the tankers, and with equipment more suited to structure fires, they also have tankers for wildfire purposes. We are issued the minimum of required equipment, if we want more or better we raise funds to purchase it.
That’s roughly how we do it in Victoria. Other States may do things a little differently (for instance having ‘retained’, or paid-on-call firefighters), but hat’s us.