Reply #44: How?

[LiberalAndProud]

The stiff fine part ... there was no provision for it. There should have been, I'll grant you that. The city should have a provision that a homeowner not opting into the expense of the commons could pay for the entire cost of an incident plus an additional (hefty) fine. But they didn't. If (and maybe it's a big if) the homeowners were aware that they were choosing not to have access to the volunteer fire department, how is this not a foreseeable consequence of that choice?

This wasn't an issue of endangerment of life, as far as I could tell from the article. This was a loss of property. It's sad, but they chose to take the risk upon themselves, didn't they? I suspect that trapped children would have been an entirely different can of beans, so I'd rather not speculate on what may or may not have happened if that had been the case.

Edit to add: If left to people like the home owner in question, there would have been no fire department to call.