Firefighters were literally private companies before we collectively decided it was a bad idea. Firefighters would just sit and watch a place burn if nobody payed up. Sometimes rival firefighters would even get in brawls over who gets the contract while the house was burning down beside them.
if memory serves, the first fire fighters were in Rome and owned by rich people. If you didn’t pay them to put out the fire, their boss would buy the ashes from you afterwards.
https://ancient-history-blog.mq.edu.au/cityOfRome/Vigiles
okay, I was close. Buy your house while it was still on fire.
Somewhat predictably they also started the first public firefighting force after a large part of the city burned down, again. Apparently prevention is just not profitable if you’re only paying people to extinguish fire.
Didn’t prevent what is now known as the Great Fire of Rome though.
They’re municipally operated here and we actually had a case a few years back where a small town that couldn’t reasonably afford to operate their own fire department needed to make arrangements with a nearby larger town to have fire emergency response services cover them.
The larger town said sure, $50 per year per home. Small town had 63 people, but some refused to pay. Fire department said they weren’t going to keep track of which houses were and were not covered, so they had to all be on board or none of them would be.
Naturally a home later caught fire and burned to the ground. Thankfully no one was inside at the time.
