You will see many different colors of fire truck, depending on where you are in the valley. The preponderance of yellow trucks is due to that being the signature color of the Clark County Fire Department, which is responsible for the widest swath of territory. "Sometime in the 1980s, we went to yellow because it was easier to see," says Clark County Public Information Officer Dan Kulin.
The City of Las Vegas used to employ red fire trucks, then switched to white around 1970. "Red has a tendency to fade in the sun and [white] was a little bit cooler" inside the cab, according to Las Vegas Fire & Rescue Public Information Officer Tim Szymanski. But 80 percent of the fire trucks in the world are red and there was considerable public pressure, strange as this may seem, for Las Vegas to revert to red, which was done in 2001. "They [now] have acrylic paints that won’t fade," says Szymanski, and air conditioning.
The City of Henderson, bucking convention, uses white fire trucks with red lettering, "to differentiate ourselves," says a fire department spokeswoman. North Las Vegas splits the difference, with the canopy of its fire trucks emblazoned in white, while the lower half of the chassis is traditional, tomato red.
