Way back when - I can recall that as a kid my parents had to pay a small fee to both the fire company and to the ambulance corps. Failure to pay didn't result in a burnt down house or failure to transport, but would result in a large whopping bill for services rendered.

As to the situation in TN, well, stuff happens. Right, wrong or indifferent, they should have fought the fire and presented a bill, imho.

I feel for the family's loss. I've had a home burn when I was just a kid and it sucks.

But, that said, they had no right to expect the firefighters to put out the fire. If you refuse to pay your car note, your car gets repoed. If you refuse to pay your insurance, it gets dropped. If you refuse to pay your cable bill, you do without.

Very good explanation of why what was done was the right thing to do. Sad, but right.

IMO, the firefighters did not have any legal or moral duty to try to save this person's property.

Insurance comes in many forms and a 75 dollar fee to get fire protection is cheap insurance.

One question, one comment:

I think some people would agree that if you decided to skip the fee and make other arrangements, that would be a legitimate approach (if you can do that for less than $75/year). In the case of South Fulton, paying the fee meant you got a truck dispatched if it was available. There wasn't a guarantee of fire service. If you live in a remote area (not saying Obion counts) what should you have on hand to fight fire, i.e. minimum water on site, fire blankets, etc?

Some folks refer to the fee as insurance. Insurance is protection against a financial loss. You pay the premium and meet the requirements of the policy, they reimburse you.

Fire service fees and volunteer firefighting companies are a cooperative. You contribute to purchase/maintain buildings/equipment and provide training. If you pay the fee (or perhaps contribute labor) you get service free or at a reduced rate.

One eliminates or reduces the financial loss. The other eliminates or reduces the personal and property loss. Although a few news sources suggest that fire insurance companies used to provide funding and equipment to fire stations.

If the homeowner could pay during the fire, why couldn't he pay before the fire?

"It won't happen to me" works with fires every bit as well as it does with everything else.

Sue

Refusing to provide fore services to those who do not pay sounds like its correct and good. But it has down sides:

First, it doesn't save you any money. An fire large enough for people to call the fire department for is a hazard that has to be monitored, if not actively addressed. The fire is not going to stop until it runs out of fuel or is put out. Chances are it gets bigger and more expensive, and more hazardous, to put out.

The only people capable of monitoring the fire is ... wait for it... the fire department. Which means the fire department has to roll on every fire, even if they don't intend to actually put it out. If they have to go out, in case it gets out of hand, they will be spending the same time on the road and will have to bring the same number of people and the same equipment as they would if they actually intended to fight the fire.

They are also legally required to rescue people. To not rescue a person when they are on site and aware of their predicament would open the FD to being sued and possible criminally charges of 'depraved indifference'. Won't take many of those cases to eat up the budget. There is also the question of exactly how the FD determines there is nobody trapped without searching the house.

Second, the local taxing authority will be losing money even if the FD doesn't go out. If the house burns it can't be taxed. Even assuming low rates the loss of a medium-sized home from the tax rolls is going to cost the taxing authority a whole lot more than $75.

Third, the maintenance of a current database of who has paid, or not, and getting the accurate information out to the fire crews is not free. It is going to cost time and money to maintain that list. And God forbid if there is any error. County says I didn't pay. Homeowner says they did. If the FD lets the place burn and the HO pulls a receipt out of the smoking ruins the county and FD will be hip deep in lawyers. Best case, you get off just buying them a new house. If it happens once the county tells the FD to put out all the fires to save money.

There is also the intangible of sending emergency workers out on calls and telling them not to do what they do. Kind of rips the enthusiasm out of the job having a bean counter tell you you can't practice your calling. And if the crew, or even a single fireman, disobeys; will you fire them? What is that going to do for morale.

Letting the house burn if they didn't pay their fee sounds good until you look closely at it. It sounds like a deterrent. But people don't operate that way. If they did there would be no drunk driving and people wouldn't take chances. Problem is that people inherently assumes they are bulletproof. That it won't happen to them.

A better approach would be to expect a $75 fee to be paid but to bill anyone who has not paid it an additional amount. They could figure what hat would be but $750 wouldn't be unreasonable. This would be run through the normal tax system so that the unpaid tax is converted to a lien.

The funny thing is that this is not the first time this question has come up. Many of the first fire departments in the US were set up on a subscription basis. Most cities had several firehouses run as independent companies. If you wanted fire protection you contracted with a firehouse and were given a plaque to nail to your eave. If a fire was spotted alarm would be called and one or more companies would arrive. Non-contracted companies were required to rescue people but not fight the fire. Desperate homeowners would often offer up a large sum and the various companies would frequently have a fistfight, as the fire burned, to determine who took up the offer.

There was also the tendency for rich neighborhoods to have many fire companies and poor neighborhoods to have none. Unfortunately once a fire has become a major conflagration, building strength burning through the poor section of town, it is really too big to stop. So the rich, and well protected, neighborhoods burn in turn.

Fire companies also were quite territorial. Hire the wrong company and they might find their path blocked by a rival company when it is time to put your house out. A lesson to building owners to hire only the local boys if you wanted fire service. Rival companies might also sabotage equipment and cut hoses. If a company got the reputation for not being effective, for whatever reason, it tended to lose subscribers and go out of business.

The main reason we went to universal coverage was that it was/is simply more efficient. Firemen get to concentrate of putting out fires. Crews can be deployed in the most efficient manner to fight a fire without having to worry about who has, or hasn't, paid.

Yes, there are people who don't pay. Scofflaws who try to beat the system. Poor people who simply can't pay, won't. Scofflaws won't. People who are well connected politically to the municipality or fire chief won't. That is the way it has always been. Some of that can be handled administratively and/or through taxing authority. But no matter how right letting non-paying houses burn seems it is likely to cost you more in the long run to 'teach them a lesson' than to just put it out and sort it out later.

Any firefighters please feel free to chime in:

If I recall correctly, putting out a fire in a house only prevents it from burning to the ground, right? The damage is still done. The house may be "totaled" as it were depending on the response time and distance.. Another concern for the fire fighter is to keep the fire from spreading to adjacent/nearby structures. Is that a correct assumption? If so, does that person get protection if they did not pay the fee?

Man, does this thing get twisted quickly or what?

Final note: Is there a jurisdictional question on this issue with the guy?

I'm not a professional firefighter, but do have firefighting experience and training from the military, work in the fire alarm business, and am NICET certified in Fire Protection (Fire Alarms Level III).

A lot of damage is indeed done by the water used to fight the fire, no doubt. And a lot of damage will have usually been done before the fire is out. Some structures are able to be saved, but not all and this would depend on response time, construction, and a lot of other conditions.

But preventing the spread of the fire to other areas of the same structure or even to other structures is key. I've had this same discussion with people in the sprinkler business.

So here's another idea, to make sure the fee gets paid: Tack it on to something that DOES get paid, like the property tax. Just include it right in there.

I would dearly love to not pay the school part of my property taxes, but I can't. If the firefighter fee was included, I would have to pay that, too.

Then add up the number of property tax payments and multiply by $75, and direct deposit into the firefighter fund.

But maybe that is too simple, and the bureaucrats would still eff it up.

Sue

Sorry, Art, but you need to actually bone up on a bit of the reality of fire services in the USA. A fire "department" is a part of the municipal government, vs. a fire "company" - an autonomous non-profit entity authorized by and entrusted by government to provide fire services. They don't have to respond. We don't respond when we can't muster enough members. There's a difference.




Not if you don't respond. You see, that's the case here - they DIDN'T RESPOND to that fire, they responded to prevent the fire from spreading to subscriber's homes.




Do you have any idea how many times we've tried that argument without success?



it's a notebook kept at the dispatcher and in the fire truck. We're not talking about crowded areas here.




They were not dispatched.



No, it's not a deterrent. Not at all. It's not intended that way. It's fiscal survival, plain and simple. The fire companies can't operate without funding.




You can't maintain a truck, buy new gear, or obtain needed equipment today on penalty income you might get tomorrow if there's a fire. Or might not.




And with no municipal support with 100% funding of fire and emergency services, we're well on our way back to those times. The "good old days" I keep reading about.



This is not the case here, or in most "pay to spray" situations right now. These situations are in rural areas, widely spread out.



And that's why we hope that the municipalities wake up and realize that one way or another, there's a direct need for governance here.


I'll leave this topic with this article from my favorite satirical publication, "The Onion"