As an attorney, what galls me the most sometimes is people clinging to hyper techincal details on certain things when everyone knows what the right thing to do is.
This is especially true in many probate, family law, and divorce cases where siblings, spouses, children get screwed royally due to arcane rules that dont really reflect the reality of way things are.
Maybe I am just looking at my own lfe and seeing the times where I screwed up, and thankfully, someone bailed me out when they really did not have to but did it out of a sense of something else.
Did they have a legal obligation to save the home? No. Did the guy royally screw up ? Yes. Did the guy probably know the result of what would happen? Yes.
that being said, I really dont see the big deal of slapping the guy hard with a fine, judgement, lien, whatsever, but saving the house if he was willing to pay for it.
I think we all look to our experiences on things like this. For example with me, as you know I'm a cop, or at least play one on the internet. I have a book of policies, general orders and SOP's that I have to follow on a daily basis. Most of the rules in the books have someones name by them. In other words, there were very few rules at first, then someone decided that it was cool to ride on the hood of your patrol car while your partner drove after a subject fleeing on foot and jumping off the car and catching the bad guy. The hospital trip for both the officer and the bad guy resulted in the policy that we will not ride on the hood of the car while it is in motion. Fair enough.. With all those rules, we navigate them pretty well on a daily basis. There are those unusual circumstances where we have to break the rule because what happened was something outside the norm and after considering the consequences we chose to do it a different way. When we do that, we must articulate why we felt we had to deviate from the protocol. If it makes sense then we are fine.
In the case of the house burning, the occurence was the norm... there was no special circumstances. The house caught fire, he was not one of the participants in the program so there was no need to suddenly make a decision to do or not do anything. There was no other situation that arose that a reasonable person would not expect to happen if the fee wasn't paid and the house caught fire...
Anyway, the thing is, as in many topics on this board, we aren't going to agree on everything and my position or opinion is just that, my opinion. I can certainly see why people would be upset about this or not agree with the Fire Department as it is an emotional issue. I earlier responded to an inane comment by one of you with an inane response about swatting gnats. That was silly. This isn't personal, it's an issue we disagree on and I don't mind opposing views. So for responding like a 14yr old I apologize.
