Now is also the time when we have to point out that other fire departments (I think including this one) tried that and couldn’t get people to pay.
Turns out, when their house is on fire, they tend to offer to pay “anything, anything at all, just save my house, pets, and bibles.” Then afterwords slip off to the bathroom.
What do you suppose is going to happen the next time? As far as I can tell there are still lots of people that choose not to pay (including Cranick I assume). Who do you think learned their lesson from this? The morons that try to skip out on a $75 subscription fees? Or the morons running the fire department that let themselves get put in this position?
It was extensively documented earlier in the thread that when the fire department allowed people to pay $500 after-the-fact, they collected in less than 50% of the cases. So they stopped allowing people to pay after the fact because most people who say “I’ll pay anything!”, don’t.
Sure, they fire department could spend thousands of dollars in lawyer and court fees trying to get $500 out of Crannick. Or they do basic arithmetic and decide that their services simply aren’t buy-on-demand.
Please tell me you’re really being dense on purpose. Please.
There is no established “full price”. The actual “full price” relates to salaries (not just fire fighters, who apparently are volunteers, but also of City employees involved with purchasing, training, and otherwise supporting the fire brigade) plus direct expenses for fuel, supplies, etc. plus overhead costs and depreciation of equipment, insurance costs, perhaps rent, and certainly others I’m missing. I’m pretty sure that only the City Manager (or whatever equivalent City bureaucrat deals with financial matters) could even hope to calculate this number. Fire fighters on site would have not a clue. There is nothing in the City’s system whereby “actual costs” of City fire services are calculated or invoiced.
There is though an “established fee” of $500 when fire fighters service an account. But this applies only to people enrolled in the City’s subscription fire service.
And we are, once again, back to Cranick’s refusal to participate in the system available. Which was, as Giraffe says, stoooooopid!!!
Na, it was brilliant. The stoooooopid part was leaving his grandchild home with matches but without supervision. Shouldn’t there be a law preventing that? Just think of the loss to society as a result. Clearly we need a fire burning age limit, some where greater than 22. Or we need to ban fires of any sort.
I’ve seen this whole episode argued in several different places, and the results have been the same. On one side you have a bunch of people who are horrified that the fire department stood there and let the house burn down, and some of them will even argue a moral duty on the part of the fire department to save the house regardless. On the other side you have a bunch of people who recognize the practical side of it all: that the fire department is an operation that runs on money, that there are various levels of concerns like safety and moral hazard and the history of Crannick, the county, and the fire department’s efforts to handle the demands place on them.
Since Gonzomax is happily to call all of us in the latter group a bunch of heartless psychopaths, I'll feel free to psychoanalyze him. The members of the first group have a deeply romantic idea about what firemen are. They're not people who have a particular job. They're warriors in the noble fight against the scourge of flame. It's not a profession, it's a calling, a vocation. They're like priests or junkies. It doesn't matter how they get what they need to fight fires, they need to fight fires, damnit!, and the petty bureaucrats can figure out the rest.
Letting Crannick's house burn down as a matter of policy stabs that romantic image in the heart and then skullfucks a kitten to death on top of it. What we're witnessing in Gonzomax's rage is the death of a childhood vision, where firefighters stop rescuing kittens from trees only long enough to take the fire station dalmation out to pee and wash the bright shiny red truck one more time.
Really, the best comparison here is to teachers, another profession where it's said to be a labor of love more than a steady paycheck. Gonzo, if the county voted against funding its own schools and offloaded its children on the municipality's schools with no provision for funding the extra load, and the school allowed the county children to come if their parents paid a small yearly fee, would you be damning the teachers for refusing to teach the children of the county residents who wouldn't pony up? Who said "I'll pay when junior gets his diploma"? Who went on national media trying to ride a wave of indignation that the teachers wouldn't work for free?
Or we have an idea that when a person or group of people has the physical capacity, the specialized training, the specialized equipment and the availability to perform an extraordinary act – which fighting a house fire certainly is – which will prevent someone or, in this case, a family of someones, from losing everything that they own and potentially facing irrecoverable ruin, and that person or group of people are right there, non-pressing matters like unpaid fees or property taxes or boundaries that are 30 yards up a road are less important than the exigent circumstance of having an uncontrolled structure fire doing tens of thousands of dollars of damage, killing pets, destroying irreplaceable items.
The money could have been recovered at a later time, the house could not. The money plus a fine could’ve been recovered. The entire cost of the firefighting operation could’ve been recovered after the fact. It’s not romantic, it’s practical. It’s ethical.
Private businesses in Tennessee probably don’t hand over goods until they’ve actually got the money, or perform services until a significant deposit has been made. They probably also haven’t failed to collect in more than 50% of cases and continued in that mode of business.
No, the money could not have been recovered at a later time. They tried that and failed in the majority of cases. I think that, if there were some relatively convenient and cost-free way to recover those fees, they would have.