I remember another place, another time. The central government wasn’t allocating enough money for fire protection. So private companies formed to sell their services to people who wanted their houses protected in case of fire. The end result: Half the city burned down because the private fire companies went around setting fires in order to pump up demand for their services.
The city, BTW, was Rome. The time was approximately 50BC. The fire companies, owned by rich senators, were responsible for the triumphant reception that the law-breaker Julius Caesar received when he marched his single legion into the city of Rome. After all, the Republican Senators had burned half the city down. A dictator couldn’t be worse than that, right?
Oh, and the senators? They got their necks stretched or turned into pincushions. Of course. So they managed to make a profit by burning down half the city, only to lose their necks. If only our current crop of Republicans could learn lessons from history… instead, apparently they are repeating it. Private fire companies are now helping protect the houses of the rich in California thanks to a lack of public resources for fighting fires. How long until history repeats itself?
-- Badtux the History Penguin
Too late ! Heard a few years ago about the firefighters' mother , up in the MT Shasta Ca. area . She was lighting fires so her boy could go back to work . Seems to me there was another case here in Ca. of some seasonal firfighter supplying his own fires too . Sad days for all . Of course we now
ReplyDelete" farm out " Police , Health even soldiers , so why not fire too .
w3ski
Whaddup BSP,
ReplyDeleteI think it was Mark Twain that said America had the finest fire departments in the world. The rest of the world builds houses out of non-flamable materials and has no need for fire departments.
I know that bad building methods are not the crux of your post, but I really think the story of the three little pigs deserves mention.
Dave
On a strength-per-weight basis, it's hard to beat wood. A wood frame home with plywood or OSB shear walls will withstand earthquakes and winds that are hard for a steel building to withstand and that are impossible (if talking about earthquakes) for a masonry building to withstand, while being far lighter in weight (important on soils prone to sinking). While I think I would use AEC (Aerated Autoclaved Concrete) for my retirement home in Louisiana, that's mostly because of termites, not because it's fundamentally a better building material than wood.
ReplyDeleteOf course, this is all climate and soil dependent too. If you're building in the Nevada desert on a gravel soil, you can build a much heavier home than you can build on the soft silts here in the Bay Area. Here homes have to be built light so they can "float" on the silt, else you have to thump deep pilings into the soil to provide sufficient friction to keep the home from just going "glug glug glug" like a leaky boat. In a hot climate like Louisiana where during the summer the temperatures never drop below 80F even at 5AM in the morning, thermal mass is a drawback, not a benefit, whereas if you're in the high desert where it can be 100F during the day but 50F at night, the thermal averaging of having significant thermal mass can be a significant benefit since it would tend to keep the interior of your home at 75F year-round.
Similarly you are not going to build underground in Louisiana -- not unless you're trying to build a swimming pool (heh!). The water table on my property in Louisiana, for example, is less than ten feet below the surface during the rainy season, and less than twenty feet below the surface at any time of the year. The way we build a pond in those parts is just to dig a big hole in the ground at a low spot in the terrain -- it fills up with water soon 'nuff, no pumping of water required.
Anywho, just wanted to address the implied diss regarding wooden homes, which seems strange coming from an underground carpenter (heh!).
- Badtux the Building Penguin
the fire racket was run by crassus. he ended up being the biggest landlord in rome, and the richest man by far. crassus was also big on privatization of the military. the result was that the roman legions ended up being loyal to the general who dished out their pay and finagled them land grants rather than to rome.
ReplyDeleteby the time of caesar's crossing (which was literally an invasion of rome, by a roman army) nearly half of his force was paid mercenaries, gallic and belgian cavalry, spanish cohorts, german shock troops. it was the german troops who later were formed into the praetorian guards (which, over the years became the swiss guards of the popes)
privitization bitchez! it's like historical and shit.
(p.s. one of the foundation scams of boss tweed and the tammany crowd was fire brigades, they did the same thing that crassus did)