A friend of mine who was a paramedic told me that getting people out of a building is actually heavy, dangerous work. "They always die on the crapper, up 3 flights of stairs."

Also, in my town, the firefighters are also paramedics. The first people who showed up in my Moment of Need came in a fire truck. The ambulance came a couple minutes later.

That would be very unlikely in Japan, maybe it would happen a handful of times in your career and you could indeed put on safer boots.

Anyway I’m not against paramedics wearing boots in my apartment, in an emergency very few people would care about that even in Japan.