Firefighters watch man's garage go up in flames

My wife was an EMT & trained to be a volunteer firefighter. The equipment was from grants, county & federal money, private donations from individuals, companies & organizations.

They are there to stop fires. They failed in their primary duty & shoud be taken to court.
 
PT said:
Volunteer, huh? So people just give them fire trucks? They just give them oxygen tanks and heat sensors and protective suits too? All that costs money, and if they didn't enforce the rule, then you can be damn sure that everyone would simply wait for the fire to happen before they paid a red cent.
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They're called grants.

Volunteer firefighters are not paid firefighters. They hold fundraisers, donation drives, roadblocks, all manner of things to remain solvent. they are not paid wages. The equipment and training is obtained through grants and these fundraisers. The fire halls are not manned 24/7 like regular fire halls. They respond when needed. The response time is slower than with staffed fire halls. You accept that when you live in a rural area, as this man did and as I do.

These volunteer firefighters did absolutely everything they could to save my house. I know. I was there. Dammit. When the fire, whipped by 60+ mph winds, became too much for the 77 year old wood house we lived in, they turned their attention to damage control. None of my neighbors had any property damage, both my outbuildings and their contents went undamaged, and nobody got hurt.

We accepted these terms when we moved here. We pay less taxes than our counterparts on the opposite side of the city limits sign. It's part of the give and take. I stand by our decision still. Had these same firefighters come out and stood around drinking Pepsis while our house burned, asses would have been kicked and mine would not have been the only foot.

This borders on mafia tactics. Pay or else. People live in rural areas for a variety of reasons, one of which is less taxes. Less taxes means less service. It does not mean NO service.
 
It's true that grants can pay for some of that stuff, but not all of it. Where do you think those grants come from anyway? I still see it as an issue of people not wanting to buy their insurance until after they total their car.
 
If they police stand around & gawk as somebody damages the car yet do nothing about it because the car owner hasn't paid his dues to the Sheriffs Assoc, you have a comparable scenario.
 
Amazing. All this talk, and not one person bothered to actually go looking into the financing of the fair dept in the story. Half the people posting didn't even read the article from one end to the other.
 
Don't assume that all volunteers get grants; we never did. All our supplies, utilities, ambulances, etc were paid for by the generous residents of Levittown, NY. That's hundreds of thousands of dollars every year, not a grant in sight.

The only assistance we ever got was in the EMT training. The county and the state took care of that; we were allowed a certain number of people to attend periodically.
 
Professur said:
Amazing. All this talk, and not one person bothered to actually go looking into the financing of the fair dept in the story. Half the people posting didn't even read the article from one end to the other.
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I did look for more information last week because that article is very short. I was only able to find the city's website with little to no information on the FD, but I did find ads for firefighting jobs.

How else do you propose getting the financial information for the FD? Damned if I know.
 
City of Monett has audit and budget info on their web page. For the fiscal year ending 3-31-05, the budget was $950,000, and they overran it by 100k or so.

Unincorporated Barry County doesn't have a website that I can easily find. They probably have a similar budget outline, but you'd have to go to the courthouse to lay your hands on it.
 
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