I stumbled over this a few minutes ago . . .
. . . posted on a local television web site Saturday, 22 May 2021. And, I am a bit disturbed and angered by its contents · · · am I out of line being disturbed and angered?
HUGO, Ore-- Fire investigators believe they have figured out what started a structure fire that was fully engulfed in flames yesterday afternoon in the 5900 block of Tunnel Loop Road. Investigators believe that a make-shift water heater was to blame.
Around 3 p.m. Friday afternoon, Rural Metro Fire and Grants Pass Fire Rescue were called to a well-involved structure in the 5900 block of Tunnel Loop Road.
RM says that it was determined the property was not under a contractual agreement with them for suppression services, and another local fire company was already engaging the fire.
Firefighters say that after confirming there were no injuries or occupants that required rescue, RM and GP crews took standby positions out on the roadway in preparation to defend neighboring RM customers in the event of spread.
NewsWatch 12 has also learned that units from ODF Southwest Oregon District were also on scene to be on the lookout for possible ember fallout.
However, about an hour and 40 minutes later, Rural Metro says that the property owner contacted them and asked Rural Metro to engage the fire and take full control of suppression efforts.
Rural Metro says that the fire was contained shortly later after the request and that there was no damage to the adjacent structures or spread to the surrounding area.
Good night and rest easy,
RIP
Comments
Please, understand ...
If I had come upon this scene (even though I am retired) I would have taken command of the slackers and kickstarted the shutting down of that fire in a heartbeat.
RIP
Dear RIP - you are right. I have seen more reports in the
last few years of fire departments standing by rather than engaging because the owners or jurisdiction don't have a contract.
This reminds me of the old photos of early telephone companies each with their own wires on huge poles with hundreds of wires.
Privatization of social or public needs ends up in Balkanizing services and making them available to those who can pay. We are going in the wrong direction. I have long had a list of things which seem to me to be essential services for everyone's benefit. We already have some toll roads, heck why not all of them.
Working with Ron Wyden long ago during the break up of the Bell System, I saw the first push to privatize essential services like local phone/telephony, last mile lines to private homes, ranches, farms. It hurt rural customers the most. Ron was and is a proponent of corporate ownership rather than public supported commonwealth.
Looking back it makes me wonder if the break up of AT&T wasn't one of the first large shifts of public to private for profit moves.
I don't know how we will not only roll back some of the more egregious corporate takeovers and better still enlarge the domaines of commonwealth.
A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit. Allegedly Greek, but more possibly fairly modern quote.
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Only when we begin to recognize our connectedness
and demote the place of our greed based economic system will a critical mass for change become possible.
Capitalism has become some sort of perverted religion at this point, ostensibly created to serve people, it now exclusively serves its own continuation. Mankind now serves the interests of profit.
Surely the way forward will not be found by building on the foundation of the thinking which has brought us to the brink of our collective demise. A paradigm shift, based on developing the potential of human consciousness, seems to me to be the only reasonable place to begin. Without foundational transformation we will remain fully entrenched in our self destructive trajectory.
Perhaps otherworldly input (aka ET-Divine Intervention) can help us find a way. FSM knows, we haven’t been doing very well left to our own devises lately.
“The story around the world gives a silent testimony:
— The Beresovka mammoth, frozen in mud, with buttercups in his mouth…..”
The Adam and Eve Story, Chan Thomas 1963
Had to do a bit of research
try and figure out what is the deal with fire protection in Josephine County (where this incident occurred and where I used to live decades back).
Back in the mists of time, fires on private land in that area of the county would have been responded to by the Grants Pass Rural Fire Department, which was primarily volunteer - I always assumed they were a sort of public entity but trying to research this I see them described as "private". They were affectionately known as "The Foundation Savers" since that was usually about what was left of any structures by the time they were able to respond.
Anyway, the city of Grants Pass maintains its own publicly run fire department and there are Rural Fire Protection Districts covering much of the county, but not the part where the fire RIP saw reported on occurred.
Some background on the confusing situation is covered in this Bend Bulletin article from 2015
discussing a local proposal to set standards for private fire protection companies:
Bend Bulletin
Ironically, the creation of a Rural Fire District that would have covered the area in question was on the ballot the other day (May 18 Special Election) and was defeated:
Coverage of that by local TV news here
OK, so we/they do things different in Josephine County.
Agree that fire suppression is a service that should be public. Paying for that sort of thing would likely not be difficult or controversial if local needs were what got addressed *first* and it was corporate bailouts, Hellfire missiles and the like that had to compete for what was left over after that.
As the old saying goes,
"we get the government that we deserve".
I grew up in a rural, small town volunteer fire department. My dad was chief, my granddad before him, and so on. When I moved off to college, the job of chief moved out of my family for the first time in generations. I'd been on the department as a truckie since I was 14, and still carry my retired firefighter card with pride.
We would never, under any circumstances, allow a structure to burn. We did mutual aid runs to nearby communities, and covered fires in unincorporated regions of not only our county, but neighboring counties within a radius of over 50 miles. We would NEVER have stood and watched. The mere thought of it is abhorrent, and would certainly make my forebears roll in their graves. Nor would we ever have thought of sending a bill. we were funded by both municipal and county taxes, and we took the job very, very seriously.
That got a lot more complex when we took over the ambulance service, and when the town started to grow, largely because of the asshole-percentage problem. As the area got more populous, and folks started to move in from elsewhere, we started getting more assholes: the kind who call in fire or ambulance calls or bomb threats or whatnot just to hear the noise and cause grief for the first responders. There is real cost, and a nontrivial risk, in falsely calling out the people who are there only to help: it is not useful when half the department is at a false alarm 20 miles away when an actual emergency happens in the center of town. Dad retired when there finally became too many assholes for him to bear, and he was the last volunteer chief.
At this point 40+ years later, my old home town department has gone pro, and they still don't send bills- EXCEPT to the assholes. Call in a false alarm, and if they can find you, you will get the bill, backed up by deputy sheriffs to collect it. If there's a real reason for the department to respond, it is and will always be gratis. But screw with them, and be prepared to pay the asshole tax. I think that that's fair and balanced.
I don't understand people who refuse to pay taxes to support a fire service- but then, I don't understand people at all in general, and that's probably why I never got reinvolved with the fire service after moving away...
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
If you ponder the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr:
, then the problem becomes clear. Civilization costs individuals money, but the benefits are shared among the citizenry unequally. This country is built upon a basis of {Not Sharing} a thing, principle, and set of values that, among other things, often overrides common sense. Individualism rah!
In addition, things like police services, the mythical kind, fire departments, and the like are not blatantly utilitarian in the same fashion as roads. People can imagine going through their entire life without needing police or fire services, but they need roads.
There is no funding method which is satisfactory to all, but subscriptions are definitely satisfactory to the self centered, which seem to preponderate more in some areas than others.
I lived for a while in an area with a volunteer fire department. It worked because it was a community. Beyond the designated members, everybody, even those who normally didn't get along all that well, understood the dire necessity to drop whatever they were doing and turn out, and did so. The second private fire or police services (sekurity) enter the scene, it becomes possible for some to hire them and then adopt a "f*ck 'em, I got mine and don't need nobody else" attitude and things will go down from there in direct proportion to the average self-centeredness quotient of the community.
Education might be the answer, anger doesn't help, good luck.
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --