Angry, money-grubbing Tennessee bureaucrats demand firefighters allow family’s house to burn

toma

Oct 5, 2010

Senseless government is the worst, right?

Greedy bureaucrats who demanded a yearly $75 fee for fire-fighting required firemen to stand down as a fire destroyed the house of a family who hadn’t paid.

The fire reportedly continued for hours “because garden hoses just wouldn’t put it out. It wasn’t until that fire spread to a neighbor’s property, that anyone would respond” — only because the neighbor had paid the fee.

In Republican land, this isn’t a travesty. This is heroic.

. . for their trouble, the South Fulton fire department is being treated as though it has done something wrong, rather than having gone out of its way to make services available to people who did not have them before. The world is full of jerks, freeloaders, and ingrates — and the problems they create for themselves are their own. These free-riders have no more right to South Fulton’s firefighting services than people in Muleshoe, Texas, have to those of NYPD detectives.

You see, there’s a philosophy here. If you offer services to people who’d pay the fees once their house is burning, no one will pay in advance. Then you can’t have a fee-for-fire-department thing — it’s got to be set up before fires break out. So, you must not douse the fires burning non-fee-payers’ houses. It’d be the same insanity as McDonald’s giving away hamburgers, heavens. That way, the costs of state services are kept to a minimum, yay!

Of course, anybody with a brain will opt in after a lurid, money-centric disaster like this, so the fee becomes identical to a tax, and then the fire-contractors become firemen who fight fires whenever and wherever they show up. BOO!
BIG GOVERNMENT FIRE DILDOES! BOOOOOOO!

7 COMMENTS

6 Comments

R McCaslin • Oct 6, 2010 @10:01 am

There is no, none, not a sliver of an acceptable excuse that an American home should be allowed to burn to the ground because a fee was not paid or for any other reason. The South Fulton Fire Department, city manager and any other public official in that community should be jailed. The consequences these idiots did not consider, and I hope it costs them millions from those precious fees is the law suit that the lawyers are lining up to slam this community with. By the way, the families insurance would have covered the cost of putting out this fire.
toma • Oct 6, 2010 @3:36 pm

I feel the same way. Imagine any other group of people in the universe who happened upon the fire while driving around in a fire truck. They’d put out the fire in a second. But not these firefighters, they’re angry over a $75 fee. They won’t lift a finger because of what the fee represents.

One of the National Review idiots said the Cranicks were trying to sponge off their neighbors. I’d bet their bottom dollar that any of the neighbors would have begged the fire department to save the house, forget the business of who paid the fee. The firemen should have just said they would charge double the costs and then put out the fire. The fire department makes money and the house gets saved. Far better than watching the firemen stand around watching the fire . .
Senor Faraferu • Oct 7, 2010 @1:35 pm

These aren’t even smart “rugged individualists”. A real Nazi would’ve put out the fire, put the owner on the hook for a huge fee and slapped him with a lien on his house if he couldn’t pay.

So if there was a child in this house?

I fucking hate these people.
toma • Oct 8, 2010 @6:29 am

. . and the more you think about it, the angrier you or I get. Three cats and a dog dead, btw.

What if it were an arson? What if a former business partner knew they hadn’t paid and torched the home? Oh well, too bad for you. What if there were a line of houses whose families hadn’t paid? Imagine a 10 hour debacle where one after another slowly catches fire and burns. Watch one of the firemen resign his post and pick up a hose only to be pulled off the rig by the other firemen. Watch another fire department come in and try to help, and then watch the D.A. hit them with an injunction. The insanity of it all never ends.
Anonymous • Oct 10, 2010 @9:09 am

I tried to post my opinion on the City of South Fulton complaint board but is not working at the current moment. In fact, nothing that is related to City of South Fulton works right now. (I wonder why?)

I do not know how things are run down there but it deeply saddens me to see that the City of Fulton sees its’ citizen as nothing more than a financial statistic especially since the fire department’s mission statement reads, “The mission of the South Fulton Fire Department is to protect the lives and property of its citizens, and provide good public relations through fire safety education to all businesses and schools.” Apparently this mission statement is a lie. The fire department and every emergency service provider should act at a higher level of conduct. For fire department to come out and show the helpless that they can oppress them and stoop on their rights as human beings because of a lousy $75 is ludicrous. There are more appropriate ways to deal with a $75 fee than to simply watch while someone’s house, possessions, and pets are burnted down. The City of South Fulton should be ashamed of themselves for their actions. What happens if the fee gets raised to $1000? I guess only the weathy will be get this service. It’s a bad way to run an “emergency” service.
toma • Oct 10, 2010 @10:53 pm

Of course it’s a bad way to run emergency services. It’s a bad way to behave, period. It leaves them in the awkward position of being the only human beings on Earth who would choose to do nothing while a house burns down in front of them. Why did they do it? Because they’re professional firefighters.

Good for you going after those guys, they should be pilloried. Maybe after that, they’ll choose to grow up.