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.
The gory details are a bunch of good people died. I am concerned that PR can get a big payoff, but only if you have a good publicist. Should the Fed be paying off victims of a high profile work place death incident? Only if they pay off on non high profile incidents that are similar. People’s families in the twin towers on 9/11 were paid extremely well, so well that there was fraudulent cases.
If a guy that does an enclosed space rescue dies and it only makes the local news, will that be paid off as well? Isn’t his or her family worth as much? Then we should be talking about the military and that would take a longer thread.
DK