12 ms·

And here we are in modern times where we do, indeed, let buildings burn. > No pay, no spray: Firefighters let home burn > Firefighters in rural Tennessee let

• yardie 4y ago
  This story still makes the rounds, and the result is still the same. The family chose to live in unincorporated land. They turned down fire protection when the county offered it to them. They turned down fire protection when their insurer offered it to them. The fire department did what was required to save lives. Insurance can take care of the rest...oh, that's right.
  • gambiting 4y ago
    Hmmmm. I mean, yes, but doctors will still save your life even if you declined to buy any insurance all life long or pay taxes or whatever. I'm not sure I want the same "protect at all costs" attitude extended to buildings, but fire can definitely spread and even if they don't care about your property they might care about other places.
    • JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > fire can definitely spread and even if they don't care about your property they might care about other places They protected the neighbouring property.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • yamtaddle 4y ago
      > Hmmmm. I mean, yes, but doctors will still save your life even if you declined to buy any insurance all life long or pay taxes or whatever. ERs in the US are required to provide stabilizing care to patients who come in, even if the patient can't pay, by law. It's a law because otherwise some of them wouldn't.
      • bryanlarsen 4y ago
        It's also a Reagan law. So you can say that it was Reagan that introduced universal healthcare to the US.
        • yamtaddle 4y ago
          Eh, kinda, but it's not like you can walk into an ER with just any condition and get treated for free. You've got to be having pretty serious problems before they're required to do anything about it, and even then they're not required to fully treat you, just get you stable.
        • Kkoala 4y ago
          Imagine thinking that mandatory stabilizing emergency care means "universal healthcare" I hope that was a joke
        • superpatosainz 4y ago
          That's not what universal healthcare means.
    • chadash 4y ago
      But people complain about this too. No one seriously talks about not treating people in the ER with gun wounds, but Obamacare explicitly introduced the mandate that you get insurance or pay a penalty to address this very issue. Everyone is entitled to a basic level of care, but the mandate says that you should have to pay for it.
      • P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
        it's fire, if they're ever not doing it with the same fervor then we have a problem. It's one thing to declare something too dangerous and work on containment, but what's being described here isn't that.
      • vkou 4y ago
        The Obamacare penalty for not buying insurance was eliminated by Trump, because reintroducing the free rider problem is a cornerstone of GOP health policy. Reinstating the penalty is going to cost political goodwill, which is why the Dems aren't doing it. Regardless of whether the penalty is or is not in place, I wouldn't recommend being poor and sick, regardless of whether you are insured, or are freeloading.
        • djbebs 4y ago
          There is no free rider problem.
          • yamtaddle 4y ago
            Elimination of pre-existing condition exclusions, and restrictions on which factors can be used to set pricing for policies—both wildly popular—create a free rider problem.
            • dmitriid 4y ago
              Funny how it's a problem only in the "richest country in the world". It also pales in comparison to the burden and costs of existing system in the US.
    • yardie 4y ago
      They will save your life. They won't treat your trick knee, erectile dysfunction, or failing vision. And they eventually put it out to prevent it spreading. Just not with the same fervor of preventing property damage.
      • flutas 4y ago
        > And they eventually put it out to prevent it spreading. Reading the article, that's not true. They watered down the fence line to protect someone else's land. > Firefighters did eventually show up, but only to fight the fire on the neighboring property, whose owner had paid the fee. > "They put water out on the fence line out here. They never said nothing to me. Never acknowledged. They stood out here and watched it burn," Cranick said. So to your examples... > They will save your life. They won't treat your trick knee, erectile dysfunction, or failing vision. It would be closer to the story if it was "they won't save you, but they'll spray down everyone else with a disinfectant to protect them from your disease."
      • monkmartinez 4y ago
        Funny, we get called for much less than a hurt knee and failing vision via 911 every day. I don't have a choice other to send them to the ER if that is what they want. I recently went to a call where the young man thought he took too much "extenze"... Long story short, we checked vitals and asked if he wanted to be seen at ER for further evaluation. "Nah man, I got work to do now... just thought I was gonna die for a second." Anxiety and Panic... number one call type.
        • rhacker 4y ago
          My wife called for me because I accidentally drank my mouthwash. I couldn't speak and technically couldn't breath for a minute. And I would have been fine, but the bottle said to call poison control (or something - this was 10 years back) if ingested. So my wife called while I was wheezing. By the time the ambulance arrived I was totally fine... sorry about that too
      • smnrchrds 4y ago
        > They will save your life. They won't treat your trick knee, erectile dysfunction, or failing vision. I thought in the US, hospitals were only required to stabilize, not treat, non-paying patients. For example, if someone has cancer, they are not required to perform surgery or chemotherapy, just stabilize their symptoms at the moment.
    • TeMPOraL 4y ago
      Going by the linked article, they did care about neighboring property (whose owner paid the fee in advance), so they controlled the spread.
    • LarryMullins 4y ago
      > I mean, yes, but doctors will still save your life even if you declined to buy any insurance all life long or pay taxes or whatever So will firefighters. They'll save your life to the best of their ability, no matter any contracts, payments, taxes, etc. Saving your house is another matter.
      • monkmartinez 4y ago
        Number one priority on any emergency scene. Life safety... my crew comes first, but I have taken some serious risk to save people. Once the humans and animals are safe, everything else is less concerning. Risk a lot to save a lot. Most "things" can be replaced. My crew takes great pride in saving homeowners animals these days as we now have some tools to help post smoke/heat exposure (Cyanokit and O2).
        • flandish 4y ago
          Adding a second reply with same sentiment. I am also a firefighter, and my main “assignment” over the years has been search/rescue. We’ll always risk to reward. But more and more the phase after life saving is trending toward “surround and drown” - not that I want to fight like detroit in the 2010’s, but yes we do make a call sometimes to stop risking when lives are all confirmed safe.
          • elliottkember 4y ago
            Thank you (both) for your service to the community.
          • bombcar 4y ago
            There’s also a point where a structure is a total loss even if the “damage doesn’t look so bad from out here” at which point letting it burn as long as other buildings aren’t in danger may be the safest thing to do.
      • fakedang 4y ago
        [flagged]
    • zehaeva 4y ago
      This actually hasn't always been the case. In fact Hospitals were not required to treat you until 1986, which was part of the COBRA act. Prior to that there was a large practice of "Patient Dumping" where a hospital would kick you out if they found out they you couldn't pay for your treatment. Hospitals in the US would literally let you die out side the ER doors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_and_Active_Labor_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_an...
    • ghufran_syed 4y ago
      Not true. An emergency department in the US is obligated to provide life-saving care, as are EMS services and hospital doctors if the ER doc thinks you have an immediately life threatening condition . But a random oncologist has no obligation to treat you if you have a life-threatening cancer, unless you go to an ER and they determine that your condition is immediately life-threatening (say, a perforated bowel). Then the surgeon will treat you enough that you are not inmediately dying, but they are not obligated to say, remove an underlying cancer if it’s not causing immediately life threatening problems
      • gambiting 4y ago
        Well, quite obviously I meant emergency care, since I'm comparing it to a burning building.
    • citilife 4y ago
      Then you protect the insured buildings, not really sure why it's an issue? The same logic could apply to police... what if all the crime is coming from an unincorporated part of town? Do you just go and start policing it (kind of like an invading army occupying)? Or do you erect borders / station patrol cars near key locations?
      • tedunangst 4y ago
        Usual response is the city annexes the land and starts policing it.
      • db48x 4y ago
        You call the county sheriff. Sheriffs and courts were the original reason why counties exist, and why there aren't any parts of the country that exist outside of a county, while there are quite a lot of people living outside of any incorporated city.
    • kortilla 4y ago
      Saving burning buildings with no people in them is still a risk to the firefighters’ lives. Why go through that when the owners explicitly declined the protection repeatedly?
    • Spooky23 4y ago
      Sort of. They will save you from an acute emergency, stabilize you, then dump you into a care home with inadequate care or to the street as appropriate, where you play the long game of succumbing to whatever ails you.
    • fatbird 4y ago
      The municipal fire department's insurer told them that they would not cover injuries sustained while fighting fires on uninsured homes, which was the final straw for the fire department. The FD had tried for years to find a workable solution and failed because the people in the unincorporated part of the county just didn't want to pay for fire services. IIRC, the county had tried three times in the previous decade to pass taxes to either fund the municipal FD or set up their own; three times the residents of the unincorporated part voted against it. The FD had tried retroactively charging owners, and spent more on collections than they'd earn.
    • paxys 4y ago
      Doctors will save your life, not your property. It's the exact same in this case.
    • LorenPechtel 4y ago
      No. Hospitals will do what they have to *against immediate threats*. They will not do what's needed in the bigger picture if they are not paid. You don't get the chemotherapy etc if you can't pay.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • dantheman 4y ago
    If it wasn't a gov agency, something could have been worked out on the spot. Ask them if they want to pay the full price, what is it $10k, $20k?. If you don't pay, you'd have the lowest priority. But there is no reason other than bureaucracy that they couldn't have handled it.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • s0rce 4y ago
      Do people have that cash lying around, what guarantee would you have that people would pay? Maybe you can take the deed to the house that you saved?
      • jefftk 4y ago
        Seems like the agreement could be backed with the threat of a lien on your property.
        • triceratops 4y ago
          The property that just burned down?
          • michaelt 4y ago
            The fire brigade would borrow the technique of Marcus Licinius Crassus and buy your property as it burned, improve its value by extinguishing the fire, then rent it back to you.
          • deleted 4y ago
            [deleted]
          • jefftk 4y ago
            If the firefighters can't keep it from burning to the ground, I doubt you want to be paying for them to do anything. Even then, there's still the value of the land.
  • HWR_14 4y ago
    The family accepted fire protection from their insurer and claim they forgot to pay the $75 fee, not declined to do so. It's possible they opted out, it's also possible it was an oversight. Certainly, the more human thing would be to make opting in/out more explicit and handle a late payment by sending it to collections (or reminder notifications) instead of just turning service off. Or do you have any evidence they actively opted out of the $75 payment?
    • fatbird 4y ago
      A reporter on the scene spoke to the homeowner, who said he didn't pay the fee because he thought he could just pay after, like happened previously. He literally thought he could get away with not paying unless a fire happened. It's a textbook case of moral hazard. I discussed the case a lot at the time it happened, and it never came out that he "forgot" to pay the fee. It was very clear at the time that he thought he didn't need to and they'd put out the fire anyway.
      • bombcar 4y ago
        People do the same with AAA - don’t pay to renew until you need a tow and pay the renewal over the phone. I think they’re a bit smarter now and make you pay for the years you skipped.
        • grogenaut 4y ago
          That's hard as I wouldn't back pay but my insurance company goes back and forth on doing roadside depending on if you have comprehensive and has changed the rule and rates to be more or less competitive with AAA. When it's cheaper I use my I aurance, when not AAA. If they made me back pay I wouldn't use them. But I generally don't just do the sign up and tow immediately.
          • bombcar 4y ago
            I think it’s only when you want a tow same day - renewing a failed account has a three day waiting period if you don’t pay the rush fee.
  • mushbino 4y ago
    Considering the location, I imagine they couldn't afford it.
  • cryptonector 4y ago
    Just FYI for all those in the thread who don't know, unincorporated doesn't mean "no taxes, no fees". Generally the county provides services (Sheriffs and Constables, fire dept.), and ambulances tend to all be private anyways. If you're in the middle of nowhere then you may have to join a co-op for helicopter medical, and the nearest fire station may be too far to save your house in a fire. If you're in the middle of nowhere you're probably also on unincorporated land, but the challenges of being in the middle of nowhere have nothing to do with the land being unincorporated.
  • tlavoie 4y ago
    Not quite the same thing, but there are certainly places where people will choose to live, without conventional fire department coverage. I live on an island on Canada's coast, where there is a fire department, funded as a local improvement area. It covers ~ 90% of the population, on a much smaller proportion of the island's area. People do live in some of these less-accessible part of the island, but it's outside of the department's service area. Fires in other areas are officially the responsibility of the regional fire service, like for forest fires. Our department might go on certain calls, especially life safety, but will typically keep some people and vehicles back in our own service area in case calls come in there as well. I think the term for people outside of the district is "self-insured", because nobody else will be able to assist quickly.
• Yizahi 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • ch4s3 4y ago
    A libertarian scheme would look like what neighboring counties in Tennessee do, which is to charge you an hourly rate per truck if you didn't pay the subscription fee up front. This is a case where clearly no one thought about how to handle the free rider problem beforehand. I believe they've changed the policy since.
    • throwawaymaths 4y ago
      No, the competing insurance companies as described in the video is a libertarian scheme. Counties in Tennessee are a state run operation and their refusal to fight fires is a function of jurisdictional borders, which does not exactly match libertarian values.
      • ch4s3 4y ago
        I’m commenting on the parent which was responding to the anecdote about Tennessee, and not the article. The fire fighters in question in rural Tennessee are volunteers and NOT run by the state. That’s why they came up with the subscription services. Some of the counties and towns do contract with fire departments, but not all of them and not the one in question. I’m not actually sure what you’re trying to say here.
• yamtaddle 4y ago
  No solution to the free-rider problem ever makes everyone happy.
  • wolfram74 4y ago
    Interestingly, the low density of a rural area probably changes the calculus on "let it burn or eat the loss as a prevention measure" as opposed to places where uninsured buildings might be physically touching insured ones.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• afterburner 4y ago
  If this is the same story I read a long time ago, one of the reasons the firefighters didn't intervene is because their health insurance wouldn't cover any injuries, due to the house not being part of their unit's responsibilities. Universal health care might have changed the firefighters' minds. On the other hand, perhaps other liabilities would not have been covered too, so maybe not.
  • dantheman 4y ago
    I think it was a fundamental lapse of judgement and incompetence on the firefighters side. They should have had a plan for uninsured fires nearby, and been able to execute it. What is the marginal cost of putting out a fire for the uninsured, I'm sure its quite low - equipment is paid for, staff is payed for, etc. So they should be able to make a substantial profit by charging $20k for putting it out, or whatever amount they deem necessary. Just because this was an emergency doesn't mean it wasn't unexpected. We would want firefighters to go the next town over if there was a fire there, so it seems like their insurance policy was improperly under specified.
    • ejb999 4y ago
      >>They should have had a plan for uninsured fires nearby, and been able to execute it. They did have a plan, and they did execute on it - exactly as they advertised. ...and if they decided to risk it, and put out the fire anyway - and tied up all their pumps hoses ladders and trucks, and then another call comes in a few miles away - from someone that did pay for coverage - how much liability would they have for tying up all of their equipment at a fire they are not supposed to be fighting, and thus unable to respond to the fires they are supposed to be responding to? People in this country should be free to make stupid decisions - and free to suffer the consequences of those stupid decisions.
• constantcrying 4y ago
  > And here we are in modern times where we do, indeed, let buildings burn. The linked article aside, letting buildings burn down is in fact standard procedure for fire fighters. A sufficiently dense fire is extremely hard to stop as long as it can fuel itself and a controlled burn down is often the only reasonable way to end a fire. It's not like anything would be recoverable in any case.
  • leetrout 4y ago
    Yes and no. Defensive operations on an active fire ground are standard operating procedures; no argument. But most departments do not operate the way this department in Tennessee does where they did not run the call when it was received because the caller was not on their participant list. They would have likely encountered a brush fire or, at most, a room and contents fire from the structures closest exposure based on the story and they would not have let it just freely burn.
    • constantcrying 4y ago
      I am absolutely not defending whatever happened in that article. Truly a bizarre situation. Where I live firefighters certain actions will require a fee (obviously not paid to the firefighters), like pumping out a cellar or felling a tree on private land which is not threatening any property, but actually not fighting a fire when it would be easily possible would be unthinkable.
  • jasonhansel 4y ago
    I would hope, at least, that firefighters would always prioritize saving lives over saving property.
    • constantcrying 4y ago
      Yes. And these duties can easily conflict (in which case preservation of life always has priority). Another reason to let a house burn is because there are still firefighters in there, searching for people. The clothing of firefighters (at least the Nomex based used here) is extremely good at insulating from heat, but looses almost all protection the moment it gets wet, as the water starts boiling. Obviously that is extremely dangerous for the wearer. This means that often saving lives and saving property can not be done simultaneously. Some time ago here there was a report about house ownwers getting upset at firefighters for just standing around "doing nothing", while their property burned, which happened exactly for the reason outlined above.
• alex028502 4y ago
  > South Fulton's mayor said that the fire department can't let homeowners pay the fee on the spot, because the only people who would pay would be those whose homes are on fire.
  • alex028502 4y ago
    oops - by the time I recovered my password to post this excerpt, lots of other people already had
  • alex028502 4y ago
    There must be a price that the fire department could theoretically charge if they were gonna always charge on the spot, and still make a profit, as long as there is some minimum number of fires. Also it says that this TN guy had insurance. I wonder if it would have been worth his insurance company's while to make sure that $75 was always paid, either by paying it themselves, or making him pay it, or paying it and sending him the bill, and somehow making it a condition.. to protect themselves from having to pay out... as the London article is about insurance companies starting fire brigades themselves for that very reason
    • ghufran_syed 4y ago
      How would you deal with the credit risk? or are you assuming that the homeowner has arbitrary amounts of cash, at hand, but somehow not in the burning house?
      • FinnKuhn 4y ago
        I guess they have a house wich could account for some of that credit risk?
        • jahewson 4y ago
          Not once it's on fire.
        • lolinder 4y ago
• analog31 4y ago
  A friend of mine lived in a rural town with a weird mistake in its code, that let him build at the top of an extremely steep grade. The town said, legally we can't stop you (though they immediately fixed the code) but there's no way a fire truck can get up your driveway. Sure enough, his large detached shed with vintage cars in it went up in smoke, and the firefighters tried but couldn't get their truck up there.
• red_phone 4y ago
  I grew up in a poor, rural area of the US and can attest that it's true... if you didn't pay the fee (and affix the requisite metal sign below your mailbox) you were on your own in the event of a fire. At that time and place, fire protection wasn't considered a public service unless you lived in town. I never heard anyone question the arrangement and there was little appetite in that era for the tax increase that would've been required to provide universal protection.
  • bluGill 4y ago
    That depends on which rural area. I've lived in several rural areas, and we always had automatic fire service provided by the township, it was just another required tax line item. Normally they contracted with the nearest town (I know in one case the township legally owned half the town fire department and paid half the costs, the others I don't know what the details were, just that there was service from the nearest town). I know of townships that don't contract with a nearby town - but then they go in with other rural townships to form a fire department (generally volunteer - farmers sometimes got a call to leave the tractor and fight a fire)
    • db48x 4y ago
      Townships only exist in New Jersey and Pennsylvania; most of the rest have counties. As you say, it varies from place to place; any of them could start a fire service if the residents vote for it and fund it via local taxes.
      • mbg721 4y ago
        Ohio has townships within its counties; they serve as a catch-all for areas that aren't otherwise incorporated as cities/villages, and that can make a big difference for local property tax and services.
      • bluGill 4y ago
        Townships exist in most states - only the original 13 colonies don't have them. they are a federal thing, and how land was surveyed (IIRC is dates back to the Louisiana Purchase, but I can't find verification in a quick search. How each state use them differs, but the concept of a 6 mile by 6 mile section of land comes from the federal government. Originally one section (1 square mile) of land was set aside for the local school to own - some would be sold to build the school and rent from the rest would provide for the school teacher's salary. Most states also have a county, but this is different from a township. New Jersey and Pennsylvania (as part of the original 13 colonies) don't take part in the federal township system and have their own system with the same name that is otherwise not related.
• Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
  Money can be exchanged for goods and services. If you want your house extinguished then pay for it.
  • grecy 4y ago
    In developed countries that’s where our tax dollars go.
    • philwelch 4y ago
      I’m not sure that not receiving a service you didn’t pay for is any worse than going to prison or getting a lien on your house.
    • Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
      Unfortunately people seem to equate the government stealing half your money to being developed. When the correct word should be "despite".
• supertrope 4y ago
  https://www.wkms.org/government-politics/2012-03-15/south-fulton-adopts-new-fire-subscription-service https://www.wkms.org/government-politics/2012-03-15/south-fu...
• WalterBright 4y ago
  One example in a nation of 330,000,000 is not indicative of any sort of systemic problem or of what "we" do.
• aaron695 4y ago