From the Detroit Free Press: The firefighters of Detroit’s Engine 58 Squad 6 returned from putting out a small house fire just after midnight on a late summer weeknight.
They sat exhausted on the bench in front of their east-side firehouse, against the wall with bullet holes in it.
Nobody knew whether the shots that caused them were stray or otherwise. People have attacked them before, after all.
Around Christmastime, for example, someone tried to kick in the front door of the firehouse in the middle of the night and firebomb it. Two firefighters looked up just as a man threw a Molotov cocktail at the door he couldn’t get open, then calmly walked over to a car idling by the curb and drove off.
The firefighters make a point to maintain good relations with their neighbors.
For a while, Gehart told some of the local kids that if they brought him their next report card, he would give them $5 for every A they got. Sometimes he’d feed them when they came by.
But things started disappearing from the firehouse after their visits.
“They did it,” he said. “They told me. And I had to tell them, ‘After everything I’ve done for you, no one else even wanted you to come in here, but I allowed you to, and this is how you treat me?’ But they have nothing and they get tempted.”
That ended the incentive program.
The firefighters make a point to show courtesy to their uninvited visitors, too.
Like the emaciated drug addict with the shakes and sallow eyes who comes for free morning coffee. The mother and her three kids who bring a wagon full of empty water bottles and fill them using the firehouse water. The wobbly drunk who stands out front and keeps retelling the story of how his garage burned down.
They make a point to look out for the neighbors, even when it’s not their job.
“Some guy comes in and says, ‘There’s a lady getting raped at gunpoint down the street,’ ” Rentz said. It was a few weeks back, in July. “We call the police, they say ‘nobody available.’ So we went down there.”
They walked into a semi-abandoned apartment building, armed with nothing but a thick pipe wrench, and peered around corners. Nobody was there.
“We kind of just went on the sly,” Rentz said. “The three of us were thinking of our kids, or what if it was someone we knew?”
Some people show their appreciation in other ways.
Including Sue, the middle-age prostitute who stood under a tree down the street most of her unsuccessful night before coming over to the fire station out of boredom and offering to do anything to anyone before the next fire call.
“I’m not here to talk,” she announced.
She got no takers there, either. http://www.freep.com/article/20130902/COL46/309020014/detroit-firefighters-engine-58-squad-6-bankruptcy-violence-arson
While Las Vegas/Clark County Fire has their problems, nothing compare to what Detroit firefighters have to go through. the Las Vegas/Clark County firefighters have it very easy compared to their Detroit counterparts and yet we pay the Las Vegas/Clark County firefighters far more than Detroit firefighters. In addition, with the overtime scandals in the past few years in the CCFD, the CCFD firefighters are way, way overpaid and underworked.
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