Posted on 08/06/2013 8:32:42 PM PDT by The KG9 Kid
There will always be people standing around calling them 'comic book heroes'.
I must be talking to someone from the Westboro Baptist Church here...
This is the same mentality that gave us SWAT teams executing "dynamic entries" for parking violations.
Firefighters, let's keep those. You can protect your own household from property crime and you can protect yourself from violent crime but you're boned confronting a brush fire by yourself.
If the EPA allowed controlled burns, there would be no need for hotshots.
Flash fires are a natural part of the ecology. Prevent them forever and flammable biomass builds up to catastrophic proportions. It ain’t rocket surgery.
Let’s solve the real problem instead of the unintended consequences of the actions of ignorant feral government bureaucrats, shall we?
Have you ever looked carefully at the concepts behind portfolio management in distribution? Typically one can safely withdraw about 5% of a portfolio per year and have it last a lifetime. The lowest cost money managers will charge about 1% per year, leaving 4% for living expenses. This leaves just a shade over $13k per year available as living expenses.
Now this is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, but is not going to support a family with one parent and four children.
* * * * *
Now the real deal is that they are going to get Social Security benefits, and when these are tallied up, and you add in safe withdrawal from the $328k they will probably make it, but there will be few luxuries...
How ‘bout I give you the infantile Hollywood comic book name “Douchebag”? Or maybe not.
Hotshots is a name that has been in the fire service for a long time. It denotes a specific level of training. Those guys in Arizona didn’t make it up to glorify themselves—they earned it.
Not so they could fleece taxpayers like the public employee unions you rightly criticize, but because they want to serve their communities and because they like a little adrenaline. Sometimes they get too much of the latter. And I don’t blame their families if some were conveniently labeled “seasonal” when they were in fact full time, for wanting the same benefits as the rest.
BTW, I’m a volunteer firefighter, in a small department full of old farts like myself. And yes, we more or less worship “Hotshots” only because we’ve had just enough of a taste of real firefighting to know what these guys do on a regular basis.
Well, allowing controlled burns would be great in a perfect world, and there are plenty of them happening in the real one, but because of the stupid policies you mention, there is simply too much fuel built up in many areas to do them safely, or to let fires burn naturally. They can burn way too hot now, and kill the soil for generations.
It is a massive problem and a logistical near-impossibility to deal with all the built up fuels in millions upon millions of acres of forest. Maybe some sort of profit motive plan to find a commercial use for the stuff would be viable, but remember we’re dealing with a lot of lefty bureaucracies here. There is no cut and dried answer, and I for one applaud anyone willing to try to find one.
Untrue, but I know you like how it sounds.
oh, we’ll deal with it someday.
Sorry, but after the last 2 elections, I have nothing but disdain for our firefighters and EMT’s where I live.
We had Obama stickers on every car in the parking lots.
To make it worse, last week they had some fundraiser where you “fill the boot”. So they were on several corners with a fireman’s boot, stopping traffic so you could put money into it.
My wife said one of the boots had an Obama sticker on it. She wanted to give the guy the finger, but she didn’t. She just kept the window up and drove on.
We have fireman here making 120k a year and a lifetime of bennies in Chicago. They cannot be fired, well unless someone files a claim of racism or homophobia.
They get what they deserve in my city. They keep electing and endorsing these morons. Same with the cops in Chicago.
Maybe out in the country or in Texas or whatever it’s different.
$328K tax free, to boot.
agree
he obviously signed a contract and his job classification and benefits were clear
maybe he should have taken it upon himself to BUY INSURANCE
She’s getting $328K plus social security, my widowed mother raised 3 kids on less and got a job to bolster her income. Plus early in marriage my Dad and she bought a rental duplex as a form of insurance so she would always have an income and place to live, so sorry I am that this man and his wife did not plan and provide for the “what if”
if the city waives this for one man based on emotion, then any seasonal employee who died or was injured at any time should petition for the same
“I’m a little tired of everyone screaming for benefits all the time, I really am.”
I hear you; if these benefits weren’t part of the deal then emotions can’t be used to justify saddling the taxpayer with the costs. Here in NJ public employee benefits are killing us financially; in my town part-time crossing guards had great benefits packages (which simply drove American taxpayers and businesses out of the area).
“If they don’t think they are being compensated adequately, THEY COULD QUIT AND FIND REAL JOBS.”
That’s right; in my town the paid firemen sleep away their shifts in the firehouse then go work other jobs because they are all rested-up (they are a holdover from a time when we used to have a lot of industry, which died decades ago). So many of those firemen preach about the need for paid versus volunteer firemen when it come to contract negotiations, then go back to their wives and children sleeping in towns further west that have volunteer firemen (and the corresponding lower taxes).
Paid firemen are a thing of the past; fire safety has made them obsolete. Combining those skills with EMT or law enforcement might make sense (though the unions would oppose it), but paying people to sit around waiting for an increasingly rare occurrence is so 20th century. The money has dried up...
What’s this about parachuting? They were not smokejumpers.
There are several ways of looking at this. One is to look at it from the community/city point of view. An outlay will cost the community a lot. I understand the wish to avoid that.
This sort of thing doesn’t happen all that often. It’s a rare event where 19 men are lost.
The problem I have is the young family with a wife and a couple of kid survivors. This puts them in an untenable position.
The payout you mentioned will see their needs taken care of for roughly six months.
Is $17k the true value of this man to the home? No. Over the next five years this man would have brought in at least $100k, perhaps $150 or $250k.
I don’t expect the family to be compensated for life. I do believe they should be compensated for their loss, and given a reasonable amount of time to collect themselves and move on.
This isn’t like a guy fakes a stumble down some steps, and demands disability pay. These folks died in the line of duty, working for the federal government, or likely a state agency.
I don’t think a $5 - $10 million dollar payout for these 19 lost men is all that high.
$328k, is more or less an insult.
I’m not even sure that is required. I just posted a comment above this laying out my thoughts. It seems to me that if these people gave their life, that the entity that was paying them to risk their life should keep the families going for a few years. Give the wife a chance to grieve, meet someone new, and move on...
If the kids are young, there’s no need to keep it going until they are 18. I just think there should be a period of time for the family to collect themselves and move on.
If you are on the payroll your wife should get worker’s comp payout...not sure what their death benefit is now but it was pretty small when I did payroll many years ago...in the 1970s it was about $50,000 and many women did not work then so it did not seem like much for widows with children.
Many people now are considered contractors so I guess they wouldn’t even get that.
Hotshots is a fire term that is used for certain crews, the Granite Mountain part of their name is what they came up with, or the original team members there did- hotshot crew is what they were in fire lingo. That term has been used to designate certain fire crews long before any of that crew was born. It is not something they came up with from a comic book.
http://www.nwcg.gov/pms/pubs/glossary/h.htm
Hotshot Crew
1.Intensively trained fire crew used primarily in hand line construction (Type-1).
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