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Tennessee Firefighters Let Home Burn Over Subscription Issue
JASON HIBBS
WPSD
Reprinted with Permission
OBION COUNTY, Tenn. - Imagine your home catches fire but the local fire department won't respond, then watches it burn. That's exactly what happened to a local family tonight.
Related
- WPSD: Firefighters Watch as Home Burns to the Ground
- WPSD: More Fallout Following House Fire
- USAToday: Firefighters watch house burn because owner hadn't paid $...
- MSNBC: No pay, no spray: Firefighters let home burn
FireEMSBlogs.com Updates
A local neighborhood is furious after firefighters watched as an Obion County, Tennessee, home burned to the ground.
The homeowner, Gene Cranick, said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late. They wouldn't do anything to stop his house from burning.
Each year, Obion County residents must pay $75 if they want fire protection from the city of South Fulton. But the Cranicks did not pay.
The mayor said if homeowners don't pay, they're out of luck.
This fire went on 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.
Turns out, the neighbor had paid the fee.
"I thought they'd come out and put it out, even if you hadn't paid your $75, but I was wrong," said Gene Cranick.
Because of that, not much is left of Cranick's house.
They called 911 several times, and initially the South Fulton Fire Department would not come.
The Cranicks told 9-1-1 they would pay firefighters, whatever the cost, to stop the fire before it spread to their house.
"When I called I told them that. My grandson had already called there and he thought that when I got here I could get something done, I couldn't," Paulette Cranick.
It was only when a neighbor's field caught fire, a neighbor who had paid the county fire service fee, that the department responded. Gene Cranick asked the fire chief to make an exception and save his home, the chief wouldn't.
We asked him why.
He wouldn't talk to us and called police to have us escorted off the property. Police never came but firefighters quickly left the scene. Meanwhile, the Cranick home continued to burn.
We asked the mayor of South Fulton if the chief could have made an exception.
"Anybody that's not in the city of South Fulton, it's a service we offer, either they accept it or they don't," Mayor David Crocker said.
Friends and neighbors said it's a cruel and dangerous city policy but the Cranicks don't blame the firefighters themselves. They blame the people in charge.
"They're doing their job," Paulette Cranick said of the firefighters. "They're doing what they are told to do. It's not their fault."
To give you an idea of just how intense the feelings got in this situation, soon after the fire department returned to the station, the Obion County Sheriff's Department said someone went there and assaulted one of the firefighters.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Ben Waller on
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Fireslayer,
Your accusations are not factual, and if I had thinner skin, I might even call them slanderous.
As for your claim that "90% of these replies said it was wrong."...Prove it. Don't give me your opinion, give me some proof. You know, some actual facts???
I've looked at many of the responses to which you refer, and most of the ones that say "IT WAS WRONG" are basing their opinions on things that aren't in the same room with either the facts or the truth.
As for my motivation, question it all you want, but check out my profile for the decades of volunteer fire/rescue and instructional time I've put in before you make that bogus "paycheck" claim again.
Cheap shots - none taken. I do have a thing for disputing logical fallacies. Logical fallacies, are neither logical nor truthful. When others use them to back their mistaken claims, it's expected that the illogic and the factual errors should be pointed out.
Fact is, Fireslayer, not only was it not WRONG, the South Fulton FD did EXACTLY what they were supposed to do.
And Fireslayer, don't accuse me of cheap shots or insults, show me some evidence. If you can't, or if your evidence isn't reliable, then your claims are bogus.
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Fireslayer,
If there were toxic chemicals present, the best way to end the incident quickly and safely is to let them burn. Destruction by fire is often the safest way to eliminate a hazmat threat.
Don't take my word for it. Take the word of the National Fire Academy's Pesticide Challenge program, that has been around since 1984.
It would have been unethical for another fire department to respond into South Fulton's subscription area, so cancelling the mutual aid was the responsible thing to do.
It would have been unethical on two counts - first, they weren't needed for fire suppression. Taking them outside their area when they weren't needed both unnecessarily stripped their city of fire protection and it added unnecessary risk of an apparatus accident.
Second, since that area had been assigned to South Fulton by the county, no other department had the right to respond there without clearance from South Fulton. If the county let different departments respond randomly, the result would be chaos.
The system they have does't create chaos. The only loser from their system lost because of his own intentional acts - not controlling an outside burn on his property and not paying his subscription.
In other words, it's his fault...twice.
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Harold didn't have all the facts of the case when he made that statement, so that statement was uninformed, at best.
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Easy - that's the way Obion County set it up.
They assigned a subscription area to South Fulton, and not to the other fire departments. Some of the other city departments have subscription areas as well.
If the county lets departments run outside their subscription areas after being cancelled, I can see a mutual aid apparatus accident causing big problems for the mutual aid department.
The bottom line is that if the first-due is on scene and cancels you, you are expected to cancel.
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Do you have any evidence for that?
Current documentation?
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In many places, gas, power, and water are MORE essential than fire, police, or EMS.
Remote, peaceful communities can survive without fire, police, and EMS services, but they can't survive without water or heat. If you don't believe that energy is essential to society, can you explain why the federal government has a Cabinet-level Department of Energy, but it does not have a cabinet-level department of fire, police, or EMS?
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Actually, Fireslayer, the people who have done the namecalling are overwhelmingly the people who think that IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN EXTINGUISHED! PERIOD!
Maybe not you - but certainly several others.
"I am not a moron, nor am I stupid." Where did anyone say that you were?
Unless you can show that someone, in fact, called you those two things, then you are using a Straw Man logical fallacy. That fallacy occurs when one sets up an extreme example that isn't something that a debate opponent said, but that in fact was made up.
If you can show some evidence that someone called you a moron or stupid, then it's not a Straw Man. If not, then you're just making it up.
The same goes for your accusations of "name calling". Either show us some evidence of namecalling, or your accusation is a logical fallacy. A logical fallacy, by definition, is neither factual nor logical.
Please stick to the facts.
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Fireslayer,
John is correct in both fact and in theory.
He is engaging in honest debate, which limits the discussion to the IDEA, not the PERSON.
Your last question is a Non Sequitur logical fallacy. In the situation in question, the family could afford to pay and intentionally chose to avoid the subscription.
Anything else is a hypothetical that did not occur, so it's neither pertinent nor factual.
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West Philly - Yes, they did help and in the exact manner you described.
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Just remember, I'm not the one advocating that the fire chief should have accepted the owner's panicky attempt at suborning a public official...
If he had accepted the owner's offer of payment and then had the fire extinguished, it is very likely that the owner could have had the fire chief arrested for extortion.
How about them apples???
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"Or if they have paid their taxes or anything else our job is to go fight fires."
Not necessarily. Sometimes our job is to NOT fight fires.
Sometimes our job is to rescue people.
Sometimes our job is to stop hazardous materials releases.
Sometimes our job is to run EMS calls.
In this case, they hadn't paid the "anything else" you spoke of. That "anything else" was their fire protection subscrption.
As for past practices, they have the right to change policy and that doesn't increase their legal liability at all. There's quite a bit of evidence that the previous South Fulton fire chief was actually violating policy when he allowed the retroactive subscriptions. If that's the case, then a previous chief's policy violations have no bearing on either the previous or the current policy.
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Robert,
Apparently, that old favorite you were taught isn't accurate.
How do those "doers" learn to "do" if they don't learn from one of those teachers you disparage?
And considering that many of the "teachers" are also "doers", doesn't that get a little confusing for you?
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