From the library: Burn

Last updated on: February 24, 2015 at 7:21 pm by Jane the Actuary

From the library: Burn 2015-02-24T19:21:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Yeah, so this is a film, not a book. It’s about firefighters in Detroit, and it’s probably available at your local library, so go check it out.

The film is a documentary, shot from December 2010 to October 2011. It’s labelled as being produced by “General Motors Entertainment Marketing” and I wondered if GM was getting into the film business, but that just means that when PBS, which initially was going to fund the project, pulled out, GM stepped in with the funding. Here’s the website, and here’s a newspaper article. It follows the crew at one firehouse, and also features scenes of the new fire commissioner trying to fix the department (and even shows him vacuuming his office, because the janitor was let go).

The sad thing? As the website says, “part of every movie ticket you’ve purchased, every DVD, Blu-ray, poster and T-shirt — went toward new equipment for Detroit firefighters. Thanks to you, we’ve been able to donate more than $310,000 of much-needed new equipment.”

Another movie, about the Chicago Fire Department, or the New York Fire Department, would probably fund scholarships for the children of firefighters injured or killed in the line of duty. Detroit needs the cash just to have enough equipment to fight the fires.

And it is certainly an illustration of the unfairness of things that suburbs like my own have all the shiny new equipment they could ask for, used so seldom that it’s major news, locally, when there’s a fire — and the Detroit firefighters, make do with duct tape repairs.

Per Wikipedia,

In 2011, the DFD responded to over 9,000 working structural fires. Over 95% of the structural fires the DFD faces are caused by arson, fifty times the national average for arson-related fires. About 85% of the arson fires that occur daily in Detroit occur in vacant homes. There are no accurate statistics considering the arson rates in Detroit, due to the fact that only a fraction of the fires can be investigated by the highly understaffed arson unit. Only investigated fire scenes can be ruled arson. The others just remain “suspicious” fires.

By comparison, New York City has about 25,000 fires per year (again, Wikipedia). But bearing in mind New York’s larger size, Detroit has over 4 times as many fires as New York when calculated on a per-capita basis, or on a per-firefighter basis. Put another way, there are 37 stations in Detroit, so, on average, each fire station fights 243 fires per year.

But here’s the other thing: Detroit is, it’s true, a disaster of a city. But having grown up in the Detroit area, and now living in Chicago, I do feel like Detroit has more of an identity, a feeling of “hometown-ness” for its residents (whether Detroit proper or the region) than Chicago, which may be far more prosperous but is still pretty much “meh” in terms of what makes it special, good or bad. I get more emotional about its fate, and can’t just write it off as “serves them right.”

But, then again, maybe one always feels that way about one’s hometown.

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