There are some principles and practices in our political order that are settled, once and for all. They are simply beyond rational dispute. No one is arguing for a hereditary monarch, with a "divine right" to rule over us. No one seriously supports the reinstatement of chattel slavery. No one believes that homosexuals, Sabbath workers and disobedient children should be stoned to death. (Well, almost no one – there are, after all, a few "Christian Dominionists" still at large).
And almost no one has questioned the wisdom of Benjamin Franklin's establishment in Philadelphia in 1736, of the first municipal fire department in colonial America.
Not until now.
Before fire-fighting became the business of local and state governments, fire-fighters were employed by insurance companies. Plaques placed on the front of homes and businesses identified the companies that underwrote the properties. If a fire alarm was answered by a cadre of fire-fighters from the "wrong" company, that was just tough luck. "Burn, baby, burn!" Many structures were lost while competing companies tried to sort out which was authorized to put out the fire.
Many more adjoining structures were consumed by fires that were oblivious to property lines.
Fires, as it happens, are not reducible to individual incidents affecting particular structures. They are public threats to communities at large. Accordingly, the task of fighting fires is appropriately assigned to municipal agencies, managed and financed by the community, which means, of course by the government. (See my "Privatization and Public Goods").
Two hundred and seventy-one years of uncontested validation of this simple truth does not faze the libertarians and the regressives (self-described "conservatives"). Some of them are now proposing a giant step backward to privatized fire fighting. As Naomi Klein reports in The Nation:
Just look at what is happening in Southern California. Even as wildfires devoured whole swaths of the region, some homes in the heart of the inferno were left intact, as if saved by a higher power. But it wasn't the hand of God; in several cases it was the handiwork of Firebreak Spray Systems. Firebreak is a special service offered to customers of insurance giant American International Group (AIG)--but only if they happen to live in the wealthiest ZIP codes in the country. Members of the company's Private Client Group pay an average of $19,000 to have their homes sprayed with fire retardant. During the wildfires, the "mobile units"--racing around in red firetrucks--even extinguished fires for their clients.
One customer described a scene of modern-day Revelation. "Just picture it. Here you are in that raging wildfire. Smoke everywhere. Flames everywhere. Plumes of smoke coming up over the hills," he told the Los Angeles Times. "Here's a couple guys showing up in what looks like a firetruck who are experts trained in fighting wildfire and they're there specifically to protect your home."
And your home alone. "There were a few instances," one of the private firefighters told Bloomberg News, "where we were spraying and the neighbor's house went up like a candle." With public fire departments cut to the bone, gone are the days of Rapid Response, when everyone was entitled to equal protection.
Privatized fire fighting? It was a lousy idea in Ben Franklin's time, and it is lousy idea today.
This is why:
Privatized fire fighting is inefficient. Several separate and uncoordinated fire crews struggling to save separate individual homes are far less efficient than a large, integrated and strategically organized "army" of fire-fighters. Add up the costs of manpower, equipment and losses to the fires, and the latter, coordinated, effort will always win, hands down. This will be so, even if every structure in the area is "protected" by one or another private company of "responders." Imagine, for example, a street in which a line of houses is insured and protected, sequentially from left to right, by the fire crews of Acme, Inc., Gecko, Inc., Good Hands, Inc., Acme, Inc., Gecko, Inc., Good Hands, Inc. – then add a few more companies, in random order, as you continue down the street. See what I mean? It's far less expensive and more efficient if one agency is protecting the neighborhood as a unit. But more significantly, this example demonstrates that:
Privatized fire fighting is ineffective. The approach described above – several independent companies protecting individual homes, randomly situated – is comparable to opposing an invading army with individual local police and sheriff departments. An invading army attacking with an integrated force and battle plan can only be defeated by an opposing army with a superior integrated force and battle plan. Supply lines, effective use of available equipment, deployment of personnel, geographical contingencies, must all be taken into account by the opposing generals as they plan attacks, defenses and counter-attacks. Indefensible lands must be yielded and their populations abandoned so that forces might regroup on defensible terrain. Command decisions must be communicated intact through the company commanders to the individual soldiers. Decisive advantage is enjoyed by the side with the accurate "Big Picture" of the entire battle, a "picture" that changes as the battle evolves.
Similarly, the massive wildfires that ravaged southern California in October and November, 2003, and again last month, had to be responded to strategically – with a consideration of available resources, of terrain, and of priorities. "The Big Picture." Thus a dozen homes, located beyond a defensible fire line (a road or a stream), might have to be sacrificed so that several hundred might be saved. Structures close to water sources and to open roads have higher priority than other structures that are isolated and offer poor means of escape for the fire fighters. The wealth or the insurance arrangements of the respective owners are irrelevant to the strategic planning of the fire fighters.
Community pre-planning and preparation are also essential to disaster management. For example, last month, in the "Grass Valley" fire near my home, the mansions of the "have mores" at Lake Arrowhead were protected by the removal of a million dead and diseased trees by order of the "big government" U.S. Forest Service, and by the local government requirement that flammable brush be removed from the modest homes of the "proletariat." Cooperative community action combined with a large-scale coordinated response by professional fire-fighters saved the day, as the fire was contained to 1200 acres and the loss of about two hundred out of ten thousand homes.. (See "The California Wildfires and Right Wing Smoke").
Dr. Ernest Partridge is a consultant, writer and lecturer in the field of Environmental Ethics and Public Policy. Partridge has taught philosophy at the University of California, and in Utah, Colorado and Wisconsin. He publishes the website, "The Online Gadfly" (www.igc.org/gadfly) and co-edits the progressive website, "The Crisis Papers" (www.crisispapers.org). His book in progress, "Conscience of a Progressive," can be seen at www.igc.org/gadfly/progressive/^toc.htm .
Public owned emergency services are not dirty words
I can not understand the abject terror America has for Socialized services!
To me it makes sense that Fire Services is in the hands of Metropolitan collective with exceptional Bush fires conflagations should be run by the state Emergency Services. We in Australias need to live with major fires on a regular basis and we has the above structures. By and large apart from the odd local screw up it serves us well.
Services in public hands should include all the essential services.
Ambulance, police, fire, electricity, water, health, schools. adoption,social services. These services are essential to life and should be subject to individual greed or cost cutting for profit. When it comes public needs people should come first not profit. The motives of public V private are different don't necesarily put the public interest first.
Our heath system may disturb some in America because in their mind it costs so much. In truth the greatest cost other than wages is supporting the private enteprises that rely on it. But it has one feature above all else.
We dont have anyone who can't get medical attention or who can't afford meds and that trumps all else.
With regard to fire our tiered system allows us to fight almost any sized blaze. The idea that the brigade being privatised here would tanamount to a declaration of war or heresy
by
Andris (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 531 comments)
on Wednesday, November 21, 2007 at 3:35:11 PM
For the last few years privatization has been tauted as the only cost and quality effective means for providing or managing services. As more and more government run entities are being privatized results are showing that the private sector has a host of problems that render it even more incompetent than government itself. If you find it hard to believe just look at the Bush administration, Its basically ran like a private business. Cronyism, deceit, no oversight, short sighted, profits above all else, lack of qualifications, disdain for labor, and many other things make the Bush administration a mirror image of our current big business mentality.
As they continue their war against the middle class one thing is certain, by destroying the middle class they are destroying demand. Lack of demand was the root cause of the great depression. You don't have to be a Nobel prize wining economist to understand this just a little bit smarter than George Bush.
by
Gary Denson (2 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 214 comments)
on Thursday, November 22, 2007 at 5:02:29 PM
2 comments
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