[QUOTE=Balthisar;12991679This because, a lot of anti-private-sector people will claim that a private company will be motivated to commit arson in order to inflate its revenues.[/QUOTE]
Indeed, this happened in CA, with at least one company that rented equiptment for firefighting and it had been a slow year.
DrDeth, you SUCK at using the quote feature. 
They did do something: they protected the house next door, whose owner had paid for fire protection.
Sometimes, municipalities have reciprocity agreements with their neighbors to respond if there’s an emergency too big for one to handle. Other times, they get reimbursed for their services by the city in which the emergency occurs. In the case of federal disasters like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina, they get FEMA money. Running a fire department is expensive, and while firefighters will generally happily do whatever’s necessary in a life-or-death situation, for anything else, there had better be a budget.
They are obligated to respond to ensure that the scene is safe and provide any necessary rescues and emergency medical service. Also, the neighbor (who paid) needed them, as Giles pointed out.
Which would explain why they showed up, as opposed to just looking at the list before loading onto the trucks.
Twice in a row!:smack:
Only in America
Or the third world
They are obligated to show up whether the guy had paid or not, in order to ensure safety. What they are not obligated to do is protect burning property for a guy who hasn’t paid.
There are a variety of state, local, and federal aid agreements that many agencies are part of. For example in CA the CA office of emergency services provides firefighting equipment/apparatus to various departments in exchange for the ability to call on that department to provide a staffed fire engine in the event of a large need for help like The Loma Prieta earthquake or the big wildland fires in San Diego a few years back.
In many cases those departments are actually paid by the agency requesting assistance and there are standard bill rates for providing those resources to other city/state agencies. Fresno and Clovis Fire have a standing arrangement for near instant dispatch of each others apparatus in the event of a large incident near the edges of each others jurisdictions. Especially after an incident a few years ago in Clovis where 3 structure fires broke out in a 5 minute period and a 12 unit apartment building burned for 19 minutes before the first Fresno engine arrived (normally they are on scene in like 4-6 minutes from doors up).
Counties often kick in here too to coordinate the needs of small towns that cannot afford their own fire department and the county will contract with the forest service or California Department of Forestry (CDF) to provide some kind of coverage since they often have year round stations scattered around.
In fact a CDF engine was the first EMS unit to arrive at a car accident I witnessed/helped at in a remote area about 6 months ago.
There are tons of such arrangements, its just not common knowledge among the rank and file, and just like ER docs and nurses usually know little if anything about medical insurance, the firefighters just know, dispatch says go…we go.
It makes sense that fire departments in one area would assist fire departments in other areas in the case of incredibly large scale disasters. I don’t know if this means there are formal agreements in place, or just a general unspoken reciprocal agreement: everyone knows NYC firefighters would be there if California had its own 9/11, etc.
Reciprocal agreements make sense, but that isn’t what we have here. What we have here is a county deciding not to pay for firefighting and a town deciding to pay for firefighting, but a resident of the county wanting firefighting services to be provided anyway. Surely you see the end result if they were to service everyone in the county: the county now knows that firefighting is available, for free! Maybe the entire state of Tennessee except South Fulton can just cut taxes and shutdown fire services - South Fulton will be responsible for rescuing them!
It sounds like it’s really a matter of risk, not cost. Responding as they do must cost nearly as much as extending full protection to everyone, but this way, having arrived, they just don’t have to go in to certain burning houses.
Just to add, I’m not voicing approval of the situation as it happened, I just don’t think the guilty party is the South Fulton fire department. It is simply unsustainable for them to be expected to provide coverage for free outside of their tax base without anything in return. I don’t think it is right that the county has no coverage, but the county is to blame for that, not South Fulton.
That’s very true. People forget that putting out a fire isn’t a matter of just pointing a hose. It’s a risky operation that puts firefighters lives in danger.
It might turn into a lower paid profession, and then it might not. There are other efficiencies that could be gained (I’m assuming that, because there are always efficiencies to be gained, whether by cutting red tape, eliminating redundancies, etc.).
Eh? How can this be true? At some point, you have to come to a most-efficient situation, whatever parameter you’re optimizing for. I admit that there may be an asymptotic approach, and in real life you would never quite make it, but still…
Think of the fire protection fee as term life insurance for your house.
If you take out a term life insurance policy, pay the annual premium and die during that year, your policy pays out. if you pay the renewal and die the following year, it pays. If you forget to pay the next renewal, and die that third year, it does not pay.
He chose not to buy the coverage. Sucks to be him, doesn’t it?
I wasn’t going to comment on the article, because, well, it seems to be running its course just fine without me. This one got to me though.
What redundancy would you propose to eliminate in the fire service? Redundancy is what prevents death, injury, property, and environmental losses. If you optimize your fire protection for exactly what you think is going to happen, Mr. Murphy is going to change the equation when you least expect it. Sure, we can call for more help from a neighboring town. If they didn’t perform the same optimization, that is. Overlap is good. Redundancy is good. It’s how the system prepares itself for the unexpected.
Imagine sending the military into battle with exactly X number of tanks and Y troops, because our calculations say that the enemy has X-1 tanks and Y-1 troops. One little bump in your planning will doom the operation. We don’t do it that way, we send in vastly overpowering force that fixes the problem (current situations not withstanding). That is the same rationale as making the fire service “efficient.” Because it is impossible to precisely plan for what we may face, we go into situations loaded for bear. Taxpayers don’t like that concept. As a taxpayer, I wish we could cut costs more than we have, but not to the point that the job won’t get done safely. That’s one of the costs of living in civilization.
Imagine the outcry when the fire department that is optimized for a room-and-contents fire, the “bread and butter” fire of every fire department, pulls up to a three story apartment building with heavy fire on the first and second floors, with people hanging out of windows on the third floor. What do you do first with your “optimal” forces? Do you hit the fire, hoping to buy time for the people above, or do you try to rescue them over ladders? You’re not doing both, and either choice is going to result in fatalities. Ask the firefighters in Ipswich, Massachusetts about making that choice. (report1, report2) It’s a loser either way. That is the kind of problem that opimizing fire protection causes, and you shouldn’t be putting your people in that kind of position.
Remember, don’t become so efficient that you become ineffective.
Oh, I was thinking strictly along the lines of administrative redundancies. It’s not like there are 10,000 fire departments, and then there are going to be 10,000 separate contract-for-service companies still doing their own thing; that’s not very efficient at all. But if you had (for example) 10 big companies that were in charge of (say) 5,000 of those fire departments, then you have the efficiencies of purchasing power, integrated networks, less local middle management, standardized training (where it makes sense), more standardized technologies, and so on. For example, it’s more efficient for Nissan and Infinity to be the same company than two separate companies.
What I don’t understand is why they couldn’t put out the fire and then bill him for the full costs afterwards? I understand that his just paying the $75 wouldn’t fly but essentially hiring them on the spot to fight the fire should work out.
Because getting people to pay up on that debt after you’ve already saved their house is pretty difficult. Apparently they used to do this and got paid less than 50% of the time.