- Luis Rubiales resigned as president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation.
- Nato announced plans for its biggest military exercise since the Cold War.
- Novak Djokovic won a record-equalling 24th grand slam at the US Open.
During California’s 2021 Caldor Wildfire, the president of the state’s firefighter union got a call from a crew leader about a mysterious set of ribbons. They were the same colour and type used by firefighters to communicate with passing crews – but the firefighters hadn’t placed them.
So what? The ribbons had been placed by private firefighters, to designate which homes they had been paid to protect. Across the Western US, encounters with firefighters-for-hire have become standard as the private sector offers services such as:
- fire suppression workers, including pilots and drone operators;
- hand-crews for forest and structure maintenance needed to stop the spread of blazes; and
- supplemental equipment like accommodation or food for crews based in the wilderness.
The US – and the world – will have worse wildfires. Cash-for-disaster-prevention businesses are meeting a growing demand for protection, prompting debate over the balance of profit, individual rights and social responsibility in the arena of public safety.
The players. Private firefighting is being used by four main groups:
- The uber-wealthy – including George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch – retain their own 24-hour on-call firefighters. Last month Oprah Winfrey was accused of going private to protect her Maui estate from fires that killed 115.
- Insurance companies offer fire-protection services packaged into home coverage policies.
- Utility companies have fire-suppression workers for high burn risk infrastructure.
- The US Forest Service, responsible for 193 million acres nationwide, spends 58 per cent of its fire budget on “contracted resources”.
Life in Gordon Gekko hues. Live-in fire protection is unlikely for anyone but billionaires, but two features of wildfires mean private firefighting helps the bottom line:
- Fires fluctuate. The number of fires is steadily trending upwards, but their severity fluctuates; in 2020 4.3 million acres were burned in California, compared with 363,939 acres in 2022. The Forest Service’s model of contracting allows bulking-out numbers in bad years, without risking a deficit in calmer ones.
- Preparation is key. Reducing vegetation or spraying buildings with flame retardant limits a blaze’s destruction and insurance companies like USAA, Travellers and Liberty Mutual now offer these services to policyholders. In the past six years insurers have lost 20 years’ worth of underwritten profits to wildfires, says Janet Ruiz of the Insurance Information Institute – investing in protection saves the cost of payouts following total destruction.
Budget cuts. Experts say normal homeowners as well as the rich are increasingly inclined to buy these kinds of policies if they can, because tight budgets at the US Forest Service have forced it to focus on existing fires rather than prevention.
They “don’t have the money to work on preventative things like education and defensible spaces,” says Dr Char Miller IV, director of Environmental Analysis at Pomona College. Which leaves open the question of what happens to those without coverage.
The other guys. Worries include:
- Coordination chaos. Managing a wildfire is no easy feat. Private crews can add confusion and more work for government crews, who now have to plan for the rescue of private firefighters if they get into trouble, says Sonoma Valley firefighter Varian Bartolini.
- Live free, might die. “They have a right to be back there, but they can’t impede our operations,” says Orange County Fire Chief Brian Fennessy. “If you get yourself killed because you chose to stay too long after it’s been evacuated, that’s not on us.”
- Stopgap, not solution. Some, like Miller, see the industry not as a necessary outgrowth of the free market but a reflection of the poor state of public utilities in the US. He worries that if governments aren’t incentivised to change course, those unable to switch to a new type of policy will be at greater risk of harm.
- Enrichment from emergency. For Brian Rice, the union boss, the fact of profits being contingent on disaster is enough of a reason to oppose the privatisation trend. “That a government entity is using tax dollars to allow a company to make a profit off of an emergency is just plain wrong,” he says. “If their profit margin is 30 per cent, that’s 30 per cent of those tax dollars it could have paid for another firefighter.”
Two realities: wildfires are growing in number and severity, and private firefighting is expanding to meet demand. And the pattern is familiar. Private security firms patrol elite suburbs so diligently that police don’t have to. In the UK, the privatisation of healthcare is led not by policy but the steady spread of private health insurance. Where the state doesn’t assert itself, it shrinks.
