Fire Response Not Povided Because Family Did Not Pay Annual Fee
By Michael Laris, The Washington Post
South Fulton, Tenn. — Lance Cranick lost almost everything: His high school letterman jacket. His football awards. Six guns. Three bows. His iPod. A flat-screen TV.
His grandfather Gene lost dozens of Zane Grey westerns. The scorched bones of the family’s dead dogs are curled in the rubble.
“It’s all because of me,” Lance Cranick, 21 and unemployed, kept repeating. He had left trash burning unattended in barrels in front of the home while he took a shower. Now his family’s home in this patch of rural Tennessee is ash. “I take full responsibility.”
But the debate over who’s responsible for the destruction at the Cranick place is no simple one. When Cranick called 9-1-1, the dispatcher told him that she’d send help right away. Ten minutes later, she said firefighters were not coming after all — because the family had not paid the city its annual $75 fire protection fee.
Fire engines did arrive at the Cranick property, but only because the flames from the barrels were spreading to their neighbor’s cornfield. And that family was paid up.
The firefighters protected the neighbor’s field and let the Cranicks’ home burn.
That act has resonated across the country as either an extreme example of how personal responsibility should be the basis of American democracy or a nightmarish incident that proves how far the country has strayed from its purpose as a place where people care for one another.
Next month, for example, Montgomery County, Md., voters will decide whether ambulance service should be included in taxes or paid for by health insurance. The proposal, approved by the County Council this year, would not deny service to the uninsured, but opponents say the plan nonetheless violates the compact that has defined the American system at least since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal: the idea of a safety net that supports all.
Just south of the Tennessee-Kentucky line, the Cranick fire remains a topic of fierce debate.
Obion County Mayor Benny McGuire worked with Gene Cranick at a nearby Goodyear plant for years and said the elder Cranick is a good man. But McGuire said the county has no budget for fire protection and that people who live outside city limits must pay for fire service.
Fire coverage is like car insurance, he said: “You don’t pay it when you have a wreck; you pay it beforehand. The responsibility lies with the landowner. ”
Now, for the first time, Gene Cranick, 67, must contend with those who think he’s some sort of freeloader.
“Some people think maybe I’m not human because I didn’t pay my $75,” he said. He remembers paying up every other year except one. “But humans forget. It seems like I do more than I used to. I just don’t think they done right.”
He recalls picking up the fire bill as he headed out on vacation in his camper, the one he and his wife, Paulette, must now live in. The bill slipped his mind.
“I don’t have hard feelings toward the firemen, because they done what they was told to do,” he said.
That sentiment is not universal in the Cranick family. After the fire, Timothy Cranick, Gene’s son, went to the South Fulton firehouse and struck the fire chief “in the face with his fist,” according to court documents. He was charged with aggravated assault.
South Fulton’s city manager, Jeff Vowell, said firefighters are barred from responding outside city limits to non-subscribers.
“My heart goes out to these folks,” he said. “I’m not a robot.”
Neither are firefighters.
“You don’t get into this to let them burn,” one said. “‘Sickening’ would be a good word, a decent word.”
Neighbor DeAnna Reams, whose field finally drew firefighters into action, begged them to save the Cranick home. Her husband offered to pay if they’d just put out the flames.
“It’s heartbreaking not to be able to help a neighbor,” Reams said. “That’s what we’re supposed to be able to do in this country.”
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