4 ms·

Be prepared for Roman fire brigades.

• gyardley 16y ago
  Or possibly just an annual fee, paid in advance, to ensure service. Not unknown in rural areas already, where people in unincorporated areas without fire departments can elect to pay out-of-area coverage to nearby municipalities. I remember some sort of controversy about that late last year, when a man who didn't pay the annual fee for firefighting service ended up losing his house.
  • _delirium 16y ago
    Some version of that is occasionally proposed for forest fires in California, but it's never managed to get enacted. Even if we accept that putting out the fire overall is the state's responsibility, a significant portion of the cost of fighting a forest fire is in saving clusters of houses (or occasionally individual houses) that are pretty close to the fire, but seem saveable. In terms of just containing the fire, it's much more efficient to put up a fairly wide perimeter and let everything within it burn, rather than sending in units to spray foam on individual houses. So it's occasionally proposed that that gets reformed somehow: either be less aggressive in trying to save houses overall; or do so but bill the owners; or stop doing it unless owners buy some sort of supplemental insurance in advance; etc. Not a very popular proposal, though. An alternate one is to assess some kind of "you live in a high-risk area" supplemental property tax, which would be more or less like a mandatory version of the insurance option.