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"Emmitsburg Mayor Frank Davis voted for Donald Trump in hopes he would cut federal spending. Now Davis hopes those cuts don't include the permanent cancellation of classes at the National Fire Academy, which is part of the town's identity and helps drive its economy. Davis is also a chief at Emmitsburg's firehouse, known as the Vigilant Hose Company."
Trump killed the Fema training academy. It's not coming back.
They voted to cut the FD in a neighboring town. Then they found out the fire response would jump from ~~8 minutes to 20+~~ nearly triple and everyone in that area would have huge increases in home owners insurance rates.
They recalled the vote and upped the budget within a month. Fucking morons.
Edit: I was off on the response times but it was moving the main department at least 6 miles farther from the closest houses to the department they wanted to close.
I mean, I can't blame people for being exhausted with taxes and everything. Wages have been mostly stagnant for fifty years, while everything is getting relentlessly monetized and the cost of living keeps spiraling out of control. I get why people could feel less than excited about ratcheting up the cost of living more. I just wish people thought a little bit past that first step of "it'll cost me more money right now?! No way!"
Is this...the consequences of my own actions?! Jeez that is stupid..
also insurance will likely stop insuring those areas too, the cost is too high. as with the idiots building in wildfire prone areas of california.
They want less building though. It’s a small wealthy New England town.
They think they’re immune to wildfires too, even though it’s all woods and the rate of drought has increased here too. Look at even New Jersey burning now.
I was driving on the parkway going towards jersey city about a week ago and the fire trucks were on both sides of the highway just spraying into the trees to keep it under control. Wild stuff.
Anything more than 3 these days is a lost cause.
I had a house fire.
I see your point, but I have to tell you: in a wood structure the difference between 8 and 20 minutes won't mean a lot for the structure. After a very small period of time, fire will have tasted most of the structure and it's a gut-job.
And, from experience, it's better as a gut. We languished in fleabag motels for 10 months with very little, and by the time they were done they could have rebuilt (1990) faster.
Edit: i am always surprised by downvotes when I'm being honest. It was horribad to lose all our basic needs in 7.5 minutes, guys. The fleabag motel had mushrooms growing out of the ceiling corners. I still maintain a gut-job would have lost us no more contents and would have been a quicker rebuild with wiring and pipes not compromised by heat. But, tell your house fire story and we'll compare notes.
It really depends on what is inside the house more than what the house is made of. A kitchen fire will typically take much longer to spread than a bedroom fire for example, because one is fairly sparsely furnished, and requires the original ignition source provide enough energy to start pyrolising the structure itself, whereas the other just has to produce enough energy to start your bed/clothing/curtains on fire, starting a chain-reaction.
Instead of worrying about what your house is made from, which is far outside the scope of what most people can control anyway, invest in fire-retardent furnishings.
And what happens to your house if your neighbor's has been ablaze for 20 minutes vs 8? Fire Departments are also pretty the only ambulance service in a lot of rural areas as well
maybe people should stop building homes with wood. We invented bricks quite a while ago
Many homes are made of brick. It doesn't stop fires because the stuff inside isn't all brick. For example if you ever heard of a fire in a city, those are all brick/stone.
https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/3-firefighters-killed-1-in-serious-condition-following-baltimore-rowhouse-fire
I like sequestered carbon
Wooden structures are easier and cheaper, if you build out of brick, housing prices in the US will go up even more. Also, wood has some other advantages over bricks, such as being more resilient against earthquakes.
How much of the US is over a fault line?
Just about all houses in Europe are made of brick.
They're no more expensive than houses in the US.
Not saying which is better (frankly I don't know), just pointing out that it really isn't as straightforward as using brick rather than wood making US house prices go up - maybe in the past, but nowadays land prices, manpower costs and speculation are what drives the realestate prices.
(After all, brick is basically baked clay, so hardly expensive stuff)
Also as somebody else pointed out brick houses last significantly longer than wood houses.
I googled and it said most homes in Germany are timber framed. Almost all house in cities in the US are brick. Fires burn the stuff inside. The outer shell doesn't matter.
https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/3-firefighters-killed-1-in-serious-condition-following-baltimore-rowhouse-fire
How much of the prizes are really material costs vs. investor gains?
On a quick search, it seems wood houses are even more expensive to build in Europe (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352710222001012). This is probably not true in the US (which has a very different infrastructure). But if one takes resale value or long time reinvestments into account, I don't think wood houses are that much cheaper, even in the US, as a percentage of the overall investment.
Idk ive seen quiet a few house fires in wood log houses that all withstood it very well. The op of the comment doesn't know what hes talking about.
It is like these morons are constantly surprised each time they discover that public services cost money.
They are even more surprised that public services are one of those things that actually saves money for a community. Like, spending on fire protection lowers insurance rates more than enough to offset the cost of the fire department...
I'm like, great, now do a basic social safety net and the costs of crime.
Oh, they know it costs money. They fail to understand that many of these things are worth the money.
Even worse. They are too dumb to understand that essential services and workers are essential.
discover that public services costS THEM money.
it's ok when it costs someone else money.
At the end of the day they're just selfish.
My favorite example is the "Free Town Project", where a bunch of libertarians from all over the country tried to take over a town in New Hampshire. After they managed to force through cuts to everything from firefighting to street lights, they had a single police officer left. And he couldn't respond to any calls, because his cruiser was broken and they refused to pay for repairs so crime rose and sex offenders started moving there.
Then came the bears.
They didn't pay for any sort of forest ranger and the cop couldn't respond. So bears started getting close and some people spent years feeding them, while their neighbors walked around armed at all times and would shoot at bears on-sight. Which led to the first black bear on human attack in the state for over a century, where a woman was attacked inside her own home. And shortly after two other attacks happened in nearby towns. So the people went into the forest one night and allegedly shot and killed a dozen bears, which didn't help. Some people suggested the city put bear protection on the trash cans, but it was not passed and was called "government overreach" by others.
So the freedom loving libertarians who moved to a town without zoning laws to live in improvised housing and roam free without laws, ended up having to put up big fences and walls around their homes to keep the bears out.
One of the big problems was that they cut trash service and eliminated regulations on trash disposal
Yeah, you already mentioned the libertarians.
Thanks for the information. Interesting reading up on this experiment. Wikipedia have several good sources. Seems many of these people forget the "personal responsibility" part of their (deranged) ideology.
Libertarians in general are special breed of ignorance, selfishness, lies, and zero empathy. Qualities we all have to some degree, but when ramped up to 11, it’s a disaster.
They've been raised on the idea that taxes are bad, and never put more thought into it than that. They view things like the fire department as good, so they can't really be funded by those bad taxes, right? ...Right?
This right there.
Those snowflakes, don't they know they have garden hoses...they should pull up their bootstraps and put out their own fires.
With water that they pumped themselves.