As am I.

The fire fighters are paid to do their job, they are not performing the duties described in their job description. I'm sorry but -- I'm more familiar with the concept of doing the job your paid to do, not passing up the responsibility due to the lack of a service fee. Dont do your job? Then your unemployed. Oh how fair the world is.

Whats really bad is that the mayor has said that they couldn't let him pay for it because then everyone would just wait for their house to catch on fire, then pay, and no one would pay the fee. How about doing the sane thing and making people pay extra for that? Or maybe, I don't know, unifying the fire department instead of this wierd fragmented county system that I've never heard of being used before.

So they will charge you a few hundred for a false alarm when a fire alarm goes off with no fire, but won't accept your money when there is an actual fire.

I wonder what would have happened if they did take action. I wonder if they would have been in trouble if they did take out the fire. There has to be more to this story.

All of a sudden I feel quite okay with Swedens taxes. :whistling:

In the USA, services ARE NOT free. Law does not require police, fire or EMS to render service...even if paid via taxes. Officers are not required to respond to every call immediately (who gets service first is based on priority of the call and available units) nor must they risk their lives to save another. EMS can't respond to every call and sometimes rely of first responders to determine if an EMT is really needed. Fire departments are not to risk their own lives to save property alone and if people are inside but the conditions indicate they are likely dead already, they are not to endanger their own lives to just because there is a mathematical chance of the victims being alive.

You normally have police, fire and EMS service via property taxes. In areas where there is no service due to insufficient funding, you might have volunteer fire departments and volunteer EMS, but they depend on donations to operate. In this area, there was no service and the local city offered to cover these people if they paid an annual fee for the service (as they did not pay city property taxes).

This guy opted to not pay the fee. They had no duty to save his property. They were there to ensure it did not spread out of control (containment is much easier than trying to keep a home from burning to the ground).

His own choice, his own problem. Some of us who live in rural areas with volunteer departments know that by the time they get to the fire, it's likely already too late to save the home. In rural areas, the outrage over taxes is actually over this very thing....you pay for police protection, but the nearest cop on any given day is likely 15-20 miles away. No chance of them getting there in time to do squat. Hard to justify higher taxes when it does not significantly improve the quality of service rendered.

I don't know what is worse: the fact that he failed to pay his fee and expected something in return or the fact that the story was on the Huffington Post and therefore quite likely to be false.

EDIT: Saw the same article on the Yahoo page, so the story is true.
Could the OP link a real news source, one that doesn't contain blatantly political jabs in it?

Double EDIT: Looks like the Yahoo one is equally antagonistic towards conservatives, even though their definition of "conservative" clearly does not match reality.

Yes this made me sick as well.


So what is next? A doctor from another region or another state is present, and sees a someone dieing and dosn't help him out with CPR or what ever because it's not his juristiction?


After reading this, I have to agree. You live out in the rual area, you should know what it's like out there. Since he "forgot" to pay, that would mean he knew about. It's not like he didn't know about it. So I am not so sickend now as I was before.

Sad yes. Very sad. So instead of blaming anyone now, the question that should be asked, how do we make shure this dosn't happen again? Do we increase everyones taxes? Once this is mentioned almost everyone will balk at it. So paying the $75 dosn't seem so bad now. Then again, if he was going to pay the $75 right then and there why wasn't it taken then?

Sure, this is bad, but it sure as hell is nowhere near as bad as you seem to think it is.

I get that he didn't pay his annual fee. But for a fire crew to stand there and let four animals die because of $75 makes me sick. Why not charge him AFTER? What's so hard about that? Hell slap a massive fine on him, don't let lives be taken because the law says so.

Agreed. Though I've always been for one paying their taxes (Even though I'm not wealthy)

If there was people in there, I think they'd be more inclined to help.

If I was one of the firefighters and I was there and I was ordered not to go in for same reasons, that this house is not covered, I would not help. I would not want to get injured then get left in the dark with an injury because I wanted to be a good guy :shrug:

Here is something that people seem to be forgetting:

1. All people were out of the house. Pets are not people.
2. More than likely the firefighters called back to HQ and were told "contain, but do not put out the house fire." Either they listen to their superiors or they put out the house fire. Calculated risk - they could easily get fired by putting out the house fire.
3. As noted by zer0netgain, services are not free in the U.S. Either they are supported by property taxes or a volunteer fire department. This family lived outside the city limits (so not paying city taxes) yet was being served by the city's fire department (as far as I understand it). They "forgot" to pay the fee for the city to render those services to the house. Thus, no fire department help. It's the same thing as not paying for running water, except more expensive.
4. The fire department has tried to charge after the fact. The problem? They have no legal recourse (or so they say) in order to get that money. Thus, it was probably likely that they put out the fire and not get paid at all later on. People are generally more concerned with putting their lives back together after a fire than paying some fee. And, again, no person was inside the house.

That is entirely a slippery slope argument. First, no people were inside the house = no person was in danger. Somebody having a heart attack is a person and requires CPR in order to live. Doctors take an oath to protect everyone. Firefighters do not.

This is horrendous! A fine would have been more than sufficient. When beurocracy comes before humanity, there's an issue.

OK, so the Firefighters were following the rules. There is doing the Right Thing and Doing What's Right. Clearly, they did what's right. Which is so wrong.

But, just what rules were they following? Rules of Common Sense and Decency? Or what some bureaucrat came up with?

I know some firefighters. They are the most selfless individuals you will ever meet, I mean they run into a burning building for a job. People don't become Firefighters because it is a safe fun job and they get to run red lights, they do so because it is a calling. Most of them would do it for no pay (if they had room and board).

I don't where these firefighters came from. I can only hope it was one person who stopped them from doing this, and not a group think decision. Frankly, if I was a firefighter at this community, I would quit my job and move to a different place to follow my path.

Psychic trauma then?

This is what I mean...the beuraocracy of it all is pathetic.



I hope you mean Psychological Trauma...unless they were indeed 'Psychic'

You can't paint the entire country with the same brush with this one incident. I know this wouldn't happen where I live - rural, within city limits, whatever. This part of California is one of those conservative "outraged over taxes" areas as well. In a fire prone area like this all fire departments do everything they can to save property. They are true heroes at times. These guys and their dept. in Tennessee are bureaucratic cretins.

I assume you mean "psychological trauma." And the short answer is "probably not." A firefighter is probably not going to risk his life by going into a burning building if he knows that there are no more people inside, regardless of the psychological trauma the family might have over losing their house or their pet. He's also probably not going to risk his own job to save a burning building if his supervisors tell him not to do so - he has both his own job security to look after and he may also have a family that depends upon that job security. Now if there were still people inside the house, that flips the situation on its head - I have no doubt those firefighters would have gone into the burning house regardless of the consequences to their jobs.

So they were just standing there to make sure the fire didn't spread to any houses which did have the fire insurance? :facepalm:

:D

Certainly seems that way from the article. Easier to contain a fire and let it burn out on its own (see California wildfires) than to try and put out a source that is already burning. Could they have done a super-extra job of "containing" the fire and save the house in the process? Probably...

Yeah, my bad. :brokencomputer:

It's SOOO easy to take that position, but are you considering....

1. The legal and lawful authority of the fire department to exist, nonetheless act?

2. The legal/liability exposure for acting outside of the legal/lawful authority granted to them?

3. The exposure risk that happens if they render service to a non-covered person then fail to do so to someone else in a similar position down the road?

I could go on at length, but you don't just chuck out the rule book because you don't agree with it. Perhaps if someone inside was in danger, crying for help, someone would have acted on the basis that a human life in danger > legal ramifications, but in this case, that was not so. All the homeowner had to do was pay his annual fee and there would not have been an issue. This guy claimed he "forgot" but lots of people elect not to pay for stuff then hope to be able to sneak under the wire once they discover they need the coverage.

Can't make exceptions for one without asking for it to snowball into something massive down the road.

For a long time, one fire department COULD NOT assist in a neighboring municipality. Many regions adopt "mutual aid" agreements which basically acknowledge a legally-authorized quid pro quo where they can assist each other even if the fire is not within their municipal boundaries. While common today, they were legally complex to arrange at first and without them, an agency/municipality is asking for legal headaches if they go where they do not have legal authority to operate. You can't just okay this stuff on a case-by-case basis. A standing SOP (standard operating procedure) must be in place beforehand so everyone knows what can and can't be done.

Sadly, believe it or not, the legal reason to have all this in place is for dumbos like this homeowner. It's rarely a city that sues another city or county for not rendering aid....it's a homeowner who sues. The guy who didn't want to pay $75/year to get city fire department services will be the first to beg to be the exception and when something goes wrong, he'll hire a lawyer to sue the department and city for not adhering to established policy and procedure.

Try not to be too rash and harsh in the judgment of the FFs behavior. My area is served by volunteers. Some funding is tax based, the rest is donations, and yes, I donate what I can every year. The FFs deserve that and much more. So I'm subsidizing my fellow taxpayers with my donations, offsetting the costs that would otherwise raise their taxes because I fear the consequences of my FD being underfunded due to bureaucratic bungling. They respond to all calls, no matter who donates, so not donating isn't a barrier to service.

Yet they can't act independently at a scene no matter what they feel -that's a sure fire way to get killed/canned. They must act as a cohesive unit. So even if one or five of the FFs wanted to act, the prohibition runs deep, and for good reasons that have nothing to do with money. That's a safety issue. They have families that need them to make it home safely. No property and/or pets are worth a FFs life. I wub my pets, but I'd never consider asking a FF to risk themselves just to try recovering them if the fire was uncontrolled. More than a few of the local FFs are my long time neighbors and friends, good folk, one and all. I currently pay one of their little ones to 'pick up litter' out front after school. Two young ones often 'visit' to play games on my XBox, which their folks can't afford. They are human beings, not movie actor heroes reading from a script.

One anology made was car insurance. If you opted not to purchase car insurance, had an accident, then purchased a policy, and expected the insurance to cover the damages/costs retroactively.

Another anology was health care. That even those with no insurance can still receive emergency health care service at a hospital/ER. But then those costs can then be legally billed to the individual or the designated financially responsible signer according to the agreement/contract between the individual/signer and the service provider. Actually collecting the money is another issue.

If his home/family/pets were so important why didn't he pay for the opt-in service the neighboring city FD offered? -just $6.25 a month! Wanna bet he had services/habits that cost much more than that? (internet, cable TV, smoking, beer) The FD said he was contacted twice this year concerning the opt-in service, no response. He's a freeloader that's crying Foul! because his luck ran out. Maybe such areas can consider a contract similar to the hospitals, to bill and recover the costs of service from the homeowners on a per incidence basis. It'll be a whole lot more than $75, Heck, that wouldn't even cover the fuel to get there.

Remember kiddies, pay your taxes or good ol' uncle Sam will lay the hammer down on ya!

It wasn't a tax, that is a big part of the problem. These people chose to live in an area that had no coverage by any fire department. A neighboring city offered to cover them for a very modest fee. These cheapskates intentionally didn't pay the fee, thus the fire department did not offer them service.

Also the fire department didn't show up and just watch the house burn. They didn't respond until someone who had paid the coverage fee called, they then responded and saved the property of the people who had paid for the service.

No one would ever pay the fee again if the fire fighters put out the fire without having been paid. Everyone would have waited until their house was on fire then offer to pay, and I am sure it costs more than $75 to respond to a fire. I bet no one in that part of the county will forget to pay the fire department again.