SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
With California experiencing two years of unprecedented wildfires that have left more than 20,000 homes destroyed and scores dead, the private firefighting business is booming. These brigades work independently from county firefighters; their job is to protect specific homes under contract with insurance companies.
Their work can vary from pushing back flames as they approach properties to reaching the site before the blaze arrives and spraying homes with fire retardant.
But the private forces have generated complaints from some fire departments, who say they don't always coordinate with local crews and amount to one more worry as they try to evacuate residents and battle the blaze.
"From the standpoint of first responders, they are not viewed as assets to be deployed. They're viewed as a responsibility," said Carroll Wills, communications director for California Professional Firefighters, a labor union representing rank-and-file firefighters in the state.
What began more than a decade ago as a white-glove service for homeowners in well-to-do neighborhoods has expanded in recent years as the wildfire danger has increased, said Michael Barry, a spokesman for the Insurance Information Institute, a not-for-profit organization that educates the public about the insurance industry.
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-private-firefighters-20181127-story.html
(Score: 2) by archfeld on Friday November 30 2018, @01:24AM (3 children)
"...Either way sometimes bad shit just happens and the deaths are a huge tragedy :(…"
I agree totally as I stated in the above sentence. But even when the bad shit happens some of it could have been mitigated by following the regulations and that has NOTHING to do with competence of the fire fighters be they state, federal or even the volunteer fire fighters from all over. What I want is for us as a whole to take the lesson to heart and do what we can to ensure the situation doesn't deteriorate to this degree again. Perhaps before you start calling people ignorant, you should read the comment and try to fully digest and understand it.
The ignorant can be educated, stupid is forever. Which one are you ?
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 3, Informative) by edIII on Friday November 30 2018, @02:36AM (2 children)
Calling somebody ignorant is not a character attack. It's kinda like the horn on a car. By default, it's informational, not a sign of intense disrespect that requires road rage.
I did fully digest the comment, thank you very much. Yes, they are very much ignorant of what these kinds of fires are. It's not about accepting the help of private firefighters, which is fairly dumb and stupid on its own, but whether or not the goal of saving property is even feasible, desirable, or achievable, without becoming a liability and a hindrance to the official firefighting crews. As Bob_super pointed out, without actually being part of the firefighters, you don't have access to the organization and coordination that is happening at the highest levels. That is because you have multiple, multiple groups with different goals trying to operate in the same space. The officials trying to save lives, then property, and the insurance hired firefighters that are trying to save properties, and not so much lives. They're mutually exclusive goals in catastrophes of this magnitude. There are normal fires, then there is the literal hell that opens up with these events. Without being hyperbolic in any way, shape, or form, these events have to be literally orders of magnitude greater than a typical fire in terms of size, speed, and ferocity. You really need to see one up close, and then you will understand. That's what I mean by ignorance, and you probably share it. You should be grateful that you are, and I hope you are ignorant.
Under normal conditions, have a private force all you want. Under these conditions, those groups either need to stay out, or the public needs to hire them on the spot, integrate them into the chain of command, and get them started. That does happen, btw. There were volunteers running heavy equipment to clear out areas trying to contain the fire working with the fire officials.
Which has nothing to do with the argument of private versus public firefighters. The lesson is a simple one; The environmentalists that brought about the paradigm of fighting all fires no matter what, were literally retarded. The good news is that we are working it, we have learned, and we even have plans and goals to mitigate this shit in the future. The bad news? Multi-year drought, almost entire forests dead (not kidding), the lack of prescribed burns for decades, and nobody anywhere being responsible for cleaning up underbrush and dead trees. It wasn't as simple as letting the timber industry in either, because they've already stated that some of these places are just too remote for them to operate in.
California has prescribed burns for some time now with a goal of 1.25 million acres per year. That's what needs to be funded more than fire fighting. Fire prevention.
It's the magnitude of the work that is a problem. We've still got a lot of work to do, literally millions of trees needing to be cut down.
I got these from somebody here:
Prescribed burning in California [yale.edu]
PMS 484 [nwcg.gov]
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 30 2018, @07:00AM (1 child)
I dunno. I've heard similar excuses wabout why since both the US president and the US vice president's wives got diagnosed with cancer, then tens of billions of dollars every year were directed towards a cure for cancer only lead to the conclusion "cancer is many diseases".
So we cant cure it, but also we never liked using math to make predictions, or do anything else reminiscent of science, but it is too hard.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 30 2018, @12:39PM
Cancer for the most part is a lot more treatable now than it was even 10 years ago. Just because we now know cancer is many diseases, that doesn't mean we haven't made any progress or have given up.