One legacy of 9-11 is the way all fire departments were able to leverage the sympathy into big budget increases.....I talked to a town commissioner in a small beach town in NC. The average income for the county is 26,000. The firefighters, who mostly have nothing to do, make 60K plus all the goobermint benefits and security.
I suspect this is not the only town in America with an under worked over paid fire department.
You’re correct, and in large proportion another segment of the government/union/Democrat rock solid alliance.
My discovery about fire fighters is that they have leveraged on local and state levels to have expensive fire sprinkler and monitoring systems installed in most rehabs as well as new construction. Effectively stopping multi construction off city water, and in some towns requiring it in single family new constructions.
This gives retirement jobs to firefighters as well as second incomes as they become owners and employees in inspections and installations.
All forced on you by the state and firefighter cronies.
In my home town it is more like a paid vacation.
Rural firefighters get lots of calls and have to treat every structure and car fire like it is a meth lab.
Yep—and lots of those firemen and their ilk retire at midlife with decades and decades of pension payments keyed off of those inflated salaries.
Living a dozen miles west of the World Trade Center, the 9/11 legacy for firemen went beyond the guts they showed on that day. The worst part of it was when the new mayor (Bloomberg) was asked when they were going to start hiring to replace the 343 firemen killed, and he said they weren’t going to replace them; the department was overstaffed and the city had already been contemplating closing many firehouses. A close second was the number of firemen who insisted on having a detachment at Ground Zero to escort remains of firemen found in the rubble; the mayor (Giuliani initially) opposed the plan, but was abused in the press by the firefighter parasites. They got their way, and the number of early retirements/disabilities jumped as one of the unhealthiest groups of people started complaining of 9/11-related ailments.
Here in the rustbelt paid fire departments are a holdover from the days when we manufactured things in factories with real dangers; now they are simply workfare wealth transfers to firemen who sleep away their shifts in the firehouse before heading off to second jobs. Most NJ departments aren’t paid (those that are paid are mainly in fallen cities that haven’t manufactured anything in decades); attempts to regionalize them (so they can fire eight fires per year instead of two or three) are stiffly resisted by the unions. Taxpayers simply vote with their feet and leave...
our fire department was able to leverage 9/11 into a new state of the art firehouse and turn our volunteer dept into a quasiprofessional organization.