South Fulton, Tennessee: The World’s Most Backward Hellhole
Welcome to South Fulton, Obion County, Tennessee. Please turn your clocks back to the early 1800s, when self-reliant people put out their own fires and didn’t need to be coddled by some newfangled socialist fire department.
Gene Cranick lives just outside the city limits of South Fulton. People who live outside the city have to pay a $75 fee to the city fire department. Gene Cranick hadn’t paid his fee, so when his house caught fire and he called 911, firefighters didn’t put out the fire. They came out and stood there watching, just to make sure the flames didn’t spread to the home of Cranick’s neighbor, who had already paid his protection money.
The Cranicks lost everything, including their three dogs and a cat.
Local fire chief David Wilds gave the order to his crew not to put out the fire. South Fulton mayor David Crocker defended the fire department’s “action.”
Now let’s just speculate for a minute. Suppose David Wilds and David Crocker were abducted by furious townspeople, beaten to a pulp and then set on fire. What should the vigilante heroes do with the charred remains of these two dead scumbags? Think of it as sort of a Zen parable.
Now of course I’m not advocating anything like that, but shit happens. Karma’s a bitch.
And every one of those pathetic excuses for “firefighters” who stood there watching while the Cranicks’ house burned should receive an Adolph Eichmann “I Vass Only Following Ordersss” award. And come to think of it, what ever happened to Eichmann?
Needless to say, Glenn Beck and his inbreds have jumped into the fray, using the Cranick family as a punching bag and calling them a bunch of sponging parasites. The article and video can be found here.
And speaking of Glenn Beck and Karma…
Labels: David Crocker, David Wilds, Gene Cranick, Obion County, South Fulton Tennessee
posted by Tom Harper @ 4:25 PM
16 Comments:
I say good for South Fulton Tennessee and it's program to end socialism in America. Now if they can Take America Back to a time where only land owners could vote....
...and only white wealthy men were landowners...
Honestly. What kind of a POS does one need to be to stand idly by, while equipped with the means to at least lessen the damage, and let someone's home burn? When it is their JOB to try to put the fire out in the first place? The whole lot of them need to be fired. All pun intended.
Screw Beck and his fat blubbering bullshit, screw the mayor of that town and his probably equally fat, blubbering bullshit, and screw those sorry bastards who have the nerve to call themselves firemen. You know, NYC had this problem once upon a time. Back in the days of Tammany Hall.
I was just following ord - oh shit, here comes Godwin and he looks pissed.
I've been waiting for this to happen for a long time. This is a perfect example as to why many communities never charged a fee like this because the moral question like this always came up.
Some communities have proposed a post penalty to put it out - I don't know if that was ever done, because most just find other ways or trust in the goodness of man.
I am more shocked that he got anything out of his Insurance Company as for not paying for his fire protection, they could call it negligence and deny him. But Insurance Companies don't do that...do they?
These alternative ways are most usual in the rural south because the people there demand low property taxes and will do anything to keep them that way, otherwise this could have been part of their taxes. I'm not trying to offend Southerners but I know this from experience.
Erik
Lew: ...and the time when the most powerful weapon was a musket, and women were dunked in the river for gossiping.
Bee: I agree those firefighters should be fired (literally or figuratively). I don't care if they were following orders; that's the equivalent of a doctor refusing to handle a medical emergency because the patient doesn't have health insurance.
Randal: Uh oh, not Godwin.
Erik: I think collecting a fee afterwards is the way to handle this. It could even be a much higher fee than the annual fee would have been. That's what they do with ambulance rides and emergency medical care for uninsured people. Just standing there and letting somebody's house burn, that's unacceptable.
tell donnie braswell..(one of your commissioners...lol)what you think of her stupidity for enforcing the no-firefighting in your town of S. Fulton
here's her email, your officials have disabled your city's web site so you cant email them
d_braswell@bellsouth.net
tell donnie braswell..(one of your commissioners...lol)what you think of her stupidity for enforcing the no-firefighting in your town of S. Fulton
here's her email, your officials have disabled your city's web site so you cant email them
d_braswell@bellsouth.net
Anon.: Thanks for the info.
One thing I'd like to know is why Cranick or a neighbor, or someone, didn't have the decency and courage to get the poor pets out before they perished. It appears no attempt was made, although on Countdown, Cranick said the animals could've been saved if the sorry excuses for firefighters had accepted his payment and gotten on it as soon as they arrived. And, they only arrived after the fence of the paid-up neighbor's place appeared to be in danger.
I get the impression the people of that community lack a lot when it comes to little things like compassion, decency and neighborliness. I wonder how many go to church regularly, not getting a damned thing out of it.
Your house? Your fire? Your pets? Well, that's your tough luck, isn't it?
What a lousy way to live.
SW: That's what I thought was the most tragic part of that incident, the family pets burning up while firefighters stood there watching.
This is totally unacceptable in a supposedly civilized country. The fire dept. could send the homeowner a bill later, even for an amount much larger than the $75 fee. But just letting the house burn, that's like an ER doctor refusing to treat a heart attack victim or gunshot victim because the person doesn't have insurance.
Tom, we need to change the law because it's not the same. What binds doctors is the Hippocratic Oath and their personal sense of duty.
Jonathan Turley was on MSNBC a couple of nights ago. He said the law is that you only have a duty to save someone from grievous harm you have caused. The firemen had a moral and ethical duty to help the Cranicks, IMO, but evidently not a legal duty.
What's called for here is a relatively simple law that says any organization whose purpose for being is in whole or in large part to extinguish fires, and any personnel whose primary job function is in whole or in large part to extinguish fires, must do their best to extinguish any fire they are aware of within their area of operation. Any financial arrangement not already made for their services will if necessary be undertaken after the fact.
Such a law spells out a firefighting organization's duty as I believe virtually all Americans think it already is, and in any case should be.
SW: I wholeheartedly agree we need that law. Firefighters need to be bound by their version of the Hippocratic Oath.
I know there was a lot of outcry from firefighters over this incident; so presumably most firemen wouldn't just stand there and let a house burn. But that obviously isn't enough. We need this law.
It's so great that the fire department is willing to allow fires to spread to people's fields and put us all at risk of a wildfire instead of promptly extinguishing them before they pose a public threat. I'm sure the farmer who's field was destroyed is very happy that the Fire Department at least showed up and contained it after allowing to to spread that far.
"Firefighters need to be bound by their version of the Hippocratic Oath."
Hah, you poor naive sonofabitch, a lot of doctors will let patients die just to harvest their organs if there's more money to be gained by doing so, and would promptly pull the plug the instant a patient's insurance ran out no matter what their wishes or odds for survival. The Hippocratic Oath should be renamed the Hypocritical Oath, because it's nothing but lip service now.
It's worth noting that Beck was indeed wrong, but that he was arguing on the side of Big Government in this case.
The fire department was, of course, the CITY fire department of South Fulton.
The owner of the house burning offered to pay not just the $75 fee, but also all of their expenses and any extra money they wanted. This is an offer that any private, for-profit fire department would have accepted for the revenue.
It took soulless government bureaucrats to turn down that offer and let the home be destroyed just to frighten neighbors into paying their taxes.
God place me with this Earth to complete a particular
number of things.
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