The fire department in question served a nearby town, and had no responsibility for the area where the fire occurred. As a service to people living outside their area, you could pay $75/year to get "out of area" coverage. The people who lost their house did two things to keep them from being covered: they didn't pay the fee, and they chose to live in an area without a fire department.

There are many thousands of communities in the US that don't have official fire departments; a large subset of them have no fire service whatsoever. It can't be the responsibility of every other community in their vicinity to provide fire service gratis.

I know 'jrockway finds it hard to believe, but I am as liberal as they come. Even I don't think that when you choose to live in East Bumfuzzle, TN that you're automatically entitled to the services of the West Bumfuzzle, TN fire department.

I suspect the firemen went there to asses whether there was 1)a high degree of danger to lives of people and 2)uncontrolled spread of the fire.

If there were people in the house, they would have more than likely used their expertise voluntarily to extract those people from the flames. But a house is just a house, even with sentimental value. (My dad is a bit of a hoarder and literally has junk that he holds on to because of "sentimental value.")

All in all, the priorities of the fire department were on the straight.

In Tennessee, it was a trash fire by the landowner's grandson that got out of hand. (So there was a third thing they had to do to lose their home: engage in a risky behavior without adequate preparation after declining the subscription coverage.) And yet it was probably a perfectly legal trash fire, in the unincorporated area where it happened. (I suspect the neighboring town outlaws such fires within its city limits.)

People who can't imagine it being reasonable to burn your own trash on your own land are also going to misinterpret the other civic service differentials in such places.

I am in no way suggesting that someone who is too cheap to buy a reasonable fee like $75 should get bailed out when they suddenly want in because their house is on fire, that's nothing more than rewarding irresponsibility. But it is not the only alternative to letting the house burn, a false dichotomy if ever I saw one.

There are two reasons to require that the FD respond if they can reasonably do so. One is economic; the limited damage and bill for extinguishing a fire might total to a $15,000 loss for the homeowner. If household earnings are $30,000/yr that's 6 months of work to pay it all back. But if the house burns to the ground, the loss is much higher; even in rural TN it's probably at least $75,000 up in smoke. That's a much bigger loss to the economy. Visualize it as a big bunch of dollar bills laid out along the ground, that starts burning from one end. I'm standing there with a bucket of water and you're offering me $5000 to put out the fire, which will leave the owner with 80% of the total, but I refuse and let it all burn because I'm still upset about your prior refusal to put down $75. Does that seem like a sensible policy? Am I somehow better off by your loss?

The other reason is legalist. The fire department has an effective monopoly on putting out fires, because only they have the necessary trucks and expertise. The homeowner didn't have the option of calling a competing fire department the way you would call a different cab company if the first one was unhelpful. Nor could one easily put out the fire oneself. In such a case, there's often a greater legal obligation to assist than usual.

Here, the fire department's non-action resulted in a much greater economic loss to the homeowner than if they had turned up and billed him. And they could have billed him, because a principle called quantum meruit means you can get a court to enforce payment for providing a necessary service even if no contract exists. Arguably, that extra economic loss, which only the fire department could have prevented, was intentionally inflicted. You can bet a case like that will go to court, and make the whole situation even more expensive.

In any case: I simply can't get around the fact that we're talking about a guy who deliberately moved to a locale that didn't have fire service. I can't understand what moral obligation could require the fire department from another city to come to his aid. We're all hung up on the fact that the fire department "stood by" and "watched his house burn down". But it wasn't his fire department!

If the guy calls up the fire department and they say 'sorry, busy fighting fires in our own town,' then too bad, that's what he gets for living in the boonies. But if they can help, and they are the only ones who can help, but they don't, it's a totally different situation. In those cases where they turn up and just watch, it's worse than not turning up at all.

It isn't like they allowed people to die in the fire, it was just a house. Just like if you wreck your car without coverage, you will be the one paying for it.

In the end, I'm sure this isn't easy for the firefighters (as the linked article mentions), but they have to make sure they provide the best service they can to those who they serve (their own town).

But, it was a city fire service, unmotivated by profit, risk-averse, and bound by inflexible bureaucratic rules.

In either case, negotiating a reasonable price balancing all the factors after the fire has started is so much more difficult to do in an equitable manner that I can understand why either municipal or purely-private fire companies might avoid doing so, on principle.

Also, given the rural setting, it's probable there were no water mains/hydrants nearby and some limited-number of tank trucks were covering a large area. Using any would mean less service for prepaid subscribers; for example any gallon deployed to save Cranick's house wouldn't be available to prevent the flames from spreading to the subscribing neighbor's yard.

With such difficult tradeoffs, and sitting at my keyboard thousands of miles away with a mixture of incomplete summary reports and perfect hindsight, I prefer to assume that the local responders were neither idiots nor heartless but did the best within the constraints they knew.

(And it's funny how the American's have bent the word liberal to mean something closer to social democrat.)

Likewise, you and most other Democrats would probably go, "Hell, we want that, too!" if a Republican listed off eir concerns about national security, countering terrorism, balancing the budget, reducing waste, etc.

And when the rubber hits the road, even fewer differences come up. The Republicans never carried out their boast of dismantling the Department of Education back in the 90s; by 2000, Bush ran on the promise of further centralizing education and enlarging the DoE, both of which he did. Republicans acted as if Obama was going to cut and run in Iraq and Afghanistan, if it didn't turn out to be possible to simply surrender to Al Queda; this has, to say the very least, not happened.

The blunt fact is that both parties are, in American terms, very, very centrist. If the supporters of either party significantly resembled the outliers that supporters of the other party use as stereotypes, American politics would be wildly different from what it actually is.

I don't think these are inherently bad ideas, either; I just don't agree with them.

(For what it's worth, I believe in a strong social safety net, and I don't believe we should plow money from the federal budget into the stock market, but I could go either way on the specifics of Social Security).

They don't. Your acquaintances are rather staunch outliers to hold those positions.

I agree that there are more moderates than fringe thinkers in both parties, but the fringe thinkers tend to make things more rather than less partisan and the moderates are not much good at telling them to go fly a kite. So this year the Republican House candidates are claiming they'll abolish the Department of Education if they win - likely an empty boast, but to me it's exasperating that the idea is even up for discussion.

Edit: Democrats' fetish for burying small businesses in paperwork is equally exasperating to me.

Just as in practice, Republicans have no interest in the abolishing of the DoE, chest-beating silliness aside. Fringers say a lot of things and some pols might try to appeal to them, but at the end of the day, it's what the mainstream wants - in both parties - that rules. Some larger groups may have occasional influence, but only when they can convince other people (at least temporarily) that they are right.

Exactly. Nobody wants someone stranger's house to burn down, but part of the rules of living there was that you'd pay your portion if you wanted protection.

On another site, I saw someone write a comment like "When my house was robbed, the insurance companies just stood there and did nothing! I offered to pay them afterwards, but they wouldn't agree!" (Obvious sarcasm.) Insurance doesn't work if you only pay it -after- you have a problem.

It's been said in several other places but this sort of intellectual dishonesty can't be left alone.

There are a plethora of examples currently in place in society that work well where if an uninsured person requires assistance they pay AT COST. If they can't afford out of pocket they set up a payment schedule.

This is a major flaw with our health system (which should be single payer), and is a framing device for a possible policy flaw in Tennessee (to wit: people in the surrounding communities should have been required to pay a substantially higher fire tax to obligate surrounding communities to cover them).

But none of this has anything to do with what the fire department did. The fire happened outside their service area. They simply weren't obligated to respond to it.

I should have said that people are provided services and given a bill. Recouping that cost is, as you point out, difficult or impossible in many cases.

>> But none of this has anything to do with what the fire department did. The fire happened outside their service area. They simply weren't obligated to respond to it.

I can't argue with that. But it's still irksome that there is no other recourse for someone confronting an extremely slow moving fire while people with high pressure hoses look on.

People generally live in double-wide trailers because they can't afford nicer houses. If someone's trailer burns down, that person is out of a house just as much as some guy in a McMansion would be if it burned down. Someone whose double-wide burned down probably has less saved money and fewer resources to take care of emself with than someone who just lost a McMansion.

As to why it might cost that much per fire, it's probably low probability event so you need to pay for all the time, training, and equipment that sit's unused between emergency's. Add in the overhead in showing up to events like this one where they receive zero compensation and you have a major free rider problem.

For that matter, I asked whether it was a case of people not reasonably being able to afford the cost five levels up; I'm asking about a "moral" distinction tptacek sees.

It would be harder to determine the right price to charge people. It's not the water that costs anything, it's the equipment. Remember, this organization is not seeking to make a profit, just cover costs. If people pay in advance, you charge (number of houses / cost of maintenance). Very straightforward. If people pay after the fact, you have to charge (number of houses that will burn down / cost of maintenance). But you don't know in advance how many houses will burn down.

Finally, while letting a house burn down is an ugly business, it's also pretty ugly when you have to send out collections. You already know they were too poor or irresponsible to pay the fee upfront, so it's not like they have a nest egg sitting around.

Would you say this creates an incentive for EMTs and paramedics to break people's legs?

Again, systems are in place to already collect from people who can't afford lump sum payments. Amortized scheduling occurs in pretty much every industry.

Yes, a certain number of people cannot and perhaps will not pay. But the net benefit to society is manifest when your neighbor's house isn't burnt to the ground.

This is not insurance, this is a protection racket.

EDIT: By protection racket I mean this: I think in this scenario there is little distinction in letting something bad happen when it is well within your ability to stop it and making something bad happen.

"If you don't pay up I'm not going to be able to stop Vito over here from breaking your legs if he tries to break your legs..."

Words mean things.

Also, a "protection racket" is when some thugs retaliate against you if you don't pay them, not when people refuse to provide a service you've previously refused to pay for.

I also have a dim view of the laws of the Alaskan city, but there's no call to throw around accusations of "intellectual dishonesty" and such just because you're angry, too.

Insurance does work. It worked in this case: The neighbors houses were saved. But when insurance is the ONLY means by which a burning house can be saved we should rethink how we treat emergencies.

About the most you could change in this scenario would have been for the FD not to have offered the service to residents outside their area, which would have made everybody worse off.

That's clearly not true. For example, he wouldn't have paid his house.

Note that they're not set up to sign a contract at the scene and even if they were, it would be signed under duress, so it would be unenforceable.

The only way "we'll pay" works is if he has the cash on hand. Do you really want to complain that they didn't offer that option?

Here's a recent Ohio case illustrating the principle - first fire-related one I found. Although this is about a bill for boarding up a property after a fire than actual firefighting, it explains the idea very clearly: http://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/rod/docs/pdf/9/2010/2010-oh...

Just saying that there are two sides to every coin.

They don't demand money at gunpoint. And they'll still send the firetrucks if my house is on fire. We're a little more civilized than that.

One of the reasons for universal fire service is to avoid the harm that comes when people try to do it on their own. You don't want random people - the homeowners, their kids or passersby - jumping in to fight a fire without the proper training, backup, and equipment.

In general, you need to owe them quite a lot of money before they will go to the bother of looking for you, which is expensive and risky; it's a lot easier to just publicly flag you as a tax debtor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_lien

Actually, what they do is evict you and sell "your" house.

That's what happened to the previous owner of my house.

Then, let us know how that goes, if they don't filter this site from federal prison. :)

Since the fire departments there lost popular support, the time is ripe for the community to organize and make their own independent FD; pool money, buy a used truck and train the jobless in fire fighting. In fact, make firefighting and emergency medical care a compulsory subject for high school seniors. Make the place into a self-sustaining kibbutz.

If I shoot myself in the leg and go to the hospital uninsured, they fix me up and then bill me for the cost. They don't let me bleed to death to "teach others a lesson."

We can't have people buying insurance whenever they need it, but it's perfectly OK to have people buy the service that the insurance pays for directly when they need it.

Which, especially for a volunteer organization, seems like a lot more work than just keeping track of who paid insurance this month and who didn't.

You're assuming that they could collect. They can't.

> Don't pay the fee, and we'll still put out your house if you want us to, but we'll charge 200 years worth of fees.

He can ignore that bill because he didn't agree to those terms.

If your neighbor's house is on fire, you don't haggle over the price of the garden hose. If you're a firefighter equipped to deal with disaster, you do your damn best to do your fucking job whenever the opportunity presents itself.

It would actually be less cruel if there was no local fire brigade at all. What kind of asshole do you have to be if you can just sit there watching a family's home burn down while doing nothing but make pompous remarks?

but...

Public services cost money. Even with donated labor, there is equipment, training, storage, certifications, and insurance to pay for. A lot of places hide these cost in mandatory taxes. Some rural places cannot do that, so they take fees paid by local landowners. Unfortunately, some people opt-out and diminish the service for all others. It could be regarded as selfish and unneighborly behavior. In this instance, it had consequences. I could have some sympathy if the $75 was more than they could pay, but it clearly wasn't.

Would it have been better if the firefighters had tried to save the house and bill for the full service. If the laws allowed it maybe, but their is no provision to pay for something that is not requested and the firefighters might be held liable for all damages. Not to mention problems with their insurance if someone were to get hurt.

"It would actually be less cruel if there was no local fire brigade at all." - No. The local fire brigade provides a valuable service for a community and probably has saved a number of lives. People opting-out should not ruin something for everyone.

In the end, this is a case of a family that didn't band together with the community to provide a valuable service to all and are now suffering for that decision.

It isn't a matter of toughness. I grew up in North Dakota and you help your neighbor. The problem is your neighbor didn't help you to begin with and there is no way that the "Good Samaritan" approach won't land you in more trouble.

I really think a lot of the reporting on the incident is not focused on why the family did not pitch in with their neighbors and pay the fee to insure service. Was it just selfishness or was their a financial reason?

FF: "Hello there, seems your house is a bit on fire sir."

HO: "Indeed, it would appear so. Would you be a good sport and point your enormous hose into my burning pile of rubble for a while, my dear lad?"

FF: "Of course, no problem. I do, however, see that you didn't pay into our 'unfortunate happenstance insurance', which means you'll have to pay our regular fees. That'll be a fantastilllion dollars and the blood of your firstborn please."

HO: "Here you go."

I grew up in Germany, which is without a doubt the most unhelpful and mean-spirited country in the whole world, and even they would not hesitate to help someone in need. The whole point of the "Good Samaritan" thing is that you don't do it for something in exchange, by the way. But in this case that doesn't even apply. The fire department would of course get something in exchange if they billed for their time and materials.

It should not matter how "evil" the family with the burning house is. It's simply morally wrong to not help them. This whole procedure highlights how deeply immoral some parts of society still are, especially in cases like this where it is apparently still seen as acceptable behavior.

By the way, not even in the dark ages, when there was no such thing as a professional fire brigade, ordinary people performed those duties without question for any member of the community. And those were the days when women were cattle and the church owned everything, mind you. But even they knew how absurd it was to only help some people in emergencies while leaving others with a self-righteous lie such as "there is nothing I can do, you deserve this".

It's easy to call on other people to risk life and limb. 'Cos it's their "job" right? Which they volunteered to do for the benefit of the community, of which this person had voluntarily opted out by not paying his fair share. Remember community implies obligations as well as benefits.

$75 over 20 years is $1500

So they are looking at committing $15,000 or even $150,000 if their house burns down. Now, bare in mind this person wouldn't even pay $75 so how are you going to get even $15k off them let alone $150k

After they save the house, they can then worry about whether the price was a fair one or not, and publicise this. People would then realise what a good deal the premiums are.

Again, there are numerous examples of systems working where uninsured people pay AT COST. Uninsured? An ambulance ride is really expensive. Uninsured? A broken leg is really expensive.

But you will still get treatment and you will eventually pay the price.

And to all the people saying "Well pay them when they show up", do you drive around without insurance until you crash, and then go to an insurance company with your monthly payment in hand and say "Pretend I've been paying this all along, now go fix my car"? Do you skimp on health insurance payments until you're in the hospital and expect to only have to pay the cost of a month's worth of health insurance? I'm really not seeing why there's such a disconnect here.

And yet, these are the same people that have a problem with the "omg terrible communist" idea of a national health care system. Sheesh.

In addition to the insurance comparison, which is apt, there is the danger aspect to consider as well. If insuring your house isn't worth less than $7 a month to you, why the hell should the firefighter consider it worth their life (potentially)?

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/10/04/county-firefighters-subs...

I mean, I am all for free market, but libertarians are pushing the limits of common sense just to maintain intellectual consistency. Isn't there a room for "late fee", or "environmental damage", or just good ole "bad PR" in their model?

And a man who won't pay up $75, will he pay thousands once you've already put the fire out?

Some search-and-rescue services (I believe in Norway, for one set of examples) have a nominal, voluntary fee that hikers and skiers can opt to pay or not. If payers need rescue, they don't have to pay anything beyond that original fee. If non-payers get rescued, they get a big bill for search helicopter fuel, labor, etc. spent in looking for them.

Something like that seems sensible to me - if the guy had said, "Yes, please put out my house, I'm aware you'll bill me,", maybe signing a waiver or whatever to prevent problems with the firefighters' insurance company, then the firefighters could try to save his house and then the city could bill him, then sue him or garnish his wages, etc. if he refused to pay.

Since they're able to constitute these drastic "watch it burn" policies by fiat, why not have a policy entitling the fire department to your car, luxury items, a portion of your income or some of your property if and only if they save your house when you're without policy?

If you have seen drunks and problem gamblers, you would know that not all people are equally responsible. It would be better for society, as a whole, if fees were taken from them in small portions, and put to service when and where they're needed.

Serves the American public right though. They're well versed in toy, divisive issues of "morality", but they're ignorant of laws that affect their lives everyday.

And what responsibility do the 300 million members of the "American public" have to know the firefighting policies of some county in Tennessee?

What we have here is a crew of GOP politicians who came to power on biblical and national issues; having been financed and propped up by their regional and state offices. The people there, like most everywhere else in the U.S., vote in lock step with their "traditional" parties, for/against issues than don't relate to them on a daily basis.

People will happily vote against their own self-interest because they're under-informed, and held emotionally captive by politicians who invoke moral and religious argument to further their agenda.

Did these people choose to have a dysfunctional fire department? No. They chose less taxes, and smaller government. The GOP, instead of thinking of what's best for the people, decided to stick by their philosophical guns and deprived people of functioning infrastructure.

I will grant you that specific house was outside their taxed jurisdiction. But then comes the next argument: why hasn't the state stepped forward to help its remote citizens? Why hasn't the state of Tennessee dictated a policy of full, state-wide coverage for fire and rescue services for people in remote areas? What's philosophically unacceptable about a state dictating to its cities and towns that they need to support those satellite households? If not, why hasn't the state collected fees from those households to insure them?

Get my drift?

When a gang of politicians has free reign to act out its wildest political fantasies and govern by its most idealized rules, well, shit tends to happen. This is what I meant by "maintaining intellectual consistency". It wouldn't harm ONE TN politician to tax people in remote areas, not ONE. But they chose not to.

Yes. The people of that county have allowed multiple attempts to set up county-wide firefighting services to fail. They've preferred fee-based out-of-area services from a city that has never had any authority to tax them.

There's no "smaller government" aspect here, there's no conspiratorial back-room change by the GOP. There's just bizarre, partisan axe-grinding by people seizing on a lurid story.

Even the american healthcare system people lets people pay for treatment if they don't have insurance. After the fact. This is what the courts exist for.

Not allowing someone to pay because there's a possibility they might default is completely ridiculous. Should we close all the restaurants now, too?

And sadly, no - if you're a homeless person and walk into most hospitals with cancer, you'll get some painkillers if you need them (before being sent on your way), not a walk to the oncology ward.

You get the cost of providing the service back, he still has a house. Allowing the dwelling to burn to the ground just results in a destruction of wealth for zero gain.

That policy means that you can't afford to have a fire crew. The marginal cost associated with putting out fires is a small fraction of the cost of having a fire department.

> And if he doesn't pay, you sue him.

And you lose because contracts under duress are unenforceable.

And you lose because contracts under duress are unenforceable.

It's not so simple. Duress is where someone forces another into a bad position, eg by setting the house on fire first. A contract made under necessity (where the house is already on fire) will probably stand, unless it's for some wildly disproportional amount.

But in any case, a contract is not always required. In cases where one party knowingly accepts the beneficial services of another, they can be billed for it as if a contract existed.

Duress only implies impaired judgment of the contract signer as due to immediate fear; it doesn’t imply the other party created the situation. Any lawyer would easily argue that the fire department charged an irrationally high cost for fire fighting that the home owner wouldn’t have agreed to had they had time to fully weight the cost and benefits of fire fighting services. In the worst case, one only need say they planned to demolish the house in the near future and therefore paying to have the fire extinguished was irrational.

A contract for non-insurance, pay-for-use fire fighting would only be enforceable if signed before the fact.

Any agreement to pay while his house is burning is unenforceable.

I've been in a similar position. Once the emergency was over, the person decided that it really wasn't worth what he agreed at the time.

How are "libertarians" and the "free market" involved?

Cost Per Fire = Fire Department Budget / Number of Fires per year

Looking here: http://www.ci.bloomington.mn.us/cityhall/dept/fire/budget/bu...

They've got about 1200 fires a year and a $3M budget

Which actually works out to $2500 per fire.

So actually, they could charge $2500 to put out the fire and end up at the same place.

So why not a tiered system. 1) $75 per year - no charge for fire extinguishing 2) $5000 - per incident cost to extinguish the fire. This can be taken out as a lien against the property for those without the cash to settle up. Perhaps a property owner does not legally have the right to refuse this service.

The "original spawn" for this post was an article where a fire department allowed a man's house to burn to the ground. Which killed three dogs and a cat.

Allowing three dogs and a cat to die for $2500 doesn't site right with me. In fact it feels downright evil.

I'm sure it doesn't sit right with the firefighters. I'd imagine that they actually have quite a bit of "psychic turmoil" and possibly even "POTS" (post traumatic stress) symptoms because of their being forced to allow animals to die.

What if it were people?

Hopefully hindsight will fix this for the future.

Compared to the actual cost of the fire, the actual numbers paid out by the insurance company, and the actual losses, even $10K would be a deal.

Maybe if you have fire insurance you shouldn't ALSO have to pay the fire department. Maybe your insurance premiums should cover that (from the article, he does have coverage).

What is the price of life?

In short: this is a major Eff up by a bean counter. It makes me angry.

If I own a very poorly maintained property but my $75, they may be obliged to turn up but I can't force the firefighters to enter an obvious firetrap just because I have a receipt for my payment. They'll do the best they can under the circumstances. The payment or non-payment of a premium tells you nothing about the safety risk of fighting a fire in any given building. Look at some worker's comp policies and you'll find the conditions revolve around the activity performed rather than exactly where that occurred. Otherwise you'd need to assess the financial risk for all possible firefighting scenarios in advance.

Here's an example application for insurance for a volunteer fire department (I can't give you a contract offhand because they're unique to each FD). The insurance company does ask what you claim, but this is in order to calculate what the premium should be. Note that this draws no distinction between whether or not lives are at risk from a given emergency call. If a FD has a policy of responding when that is the case (which they normally would), then the insurance is going to priced to include that anyway. Calls to which a response is purely optional probably make up a tiny fraction of the total, and would have a correspondingly marginal effect on premiums.

http://www.phly.com/products/forms/VFireDept/VolunteerFireDe...

As you say, if lives where at risk (not in this situation) and the charter and insurance policies noted the exception, then the insurance company would be on the hook for injury payments. This case didn't involve a person in danger and would probably give the insurance company a very good case for not paying.

If the insurance policy draws a distinction between whether or not lives at risk when a non-subscriber's call is answered, then the insurance company may have a case as you describe. But your comment seems to assume this is the norm, whereas the questionnaires I've looked at don't make that distinction.

Remember such insurance policies (issued to a FD) are upon life and limb, rather than on department revenue stability. An insurance company would challenge a payout if they felt the fire department (perhaps because of bad training or staffing policy) foolishly ordered a crew into an impossibly dangerous situation resulting in injury or death, even if the property owner was a paying subscriber. In reality, fire crews sometimes have to let a property burn and just try to stop the fire spreading, because the presence of chemicals or an unsafe building structure makes it too risky to enter.

If volunteer fire fighters are told by the people who they protect that it is ok to watch a house burn (because necessary costs were not covered somehow) then philosophically what is to stop them from not helping when I don't slip them extra money because their labor is volunteer anyway? I think this eats at the soul of the community.

Doctors are supposed to be moral paragons too, but every so often one is revealed to be abusing their trust in some horrific fashion.

This is a livejournal link, the content of which is a tedious 710 word polemic of no lasting value, zero cited sources and an overabundance of emotionally charged outrage triggers.

Not HN material at all.