Quote:
Originally Posted by Icarus
Out of curiosity; do you know of any airport fire/rescue or municipalities that bill for an emergency call-out? This would never have any bearing on my decision to avoid burning to death, but having worked for a private EMS contractor for a city?we cost money to roll?a lot (and someone has to pay).
Thanks again.
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I am not aware of any department that is responsible for airport response that ever bills for a callout to standby, for other types of calls the answer varies based on the type of call we are responding to.
The first thing for most departments in this area is someone is getting a bill if any of our equipment is broken or damaged as a result of the call and they will pursue collection in those cases.
Fire departments in this area are all over the map when it comes to charging for fire calls, they fall into 3 broad groups:
- Departments that do not bill for fire calls
- Departments that do not bill for residential fire calls, but do bill for commercial fire calls.
- Departments that bill the insurance company for all fire calls
All the departments I work and interface with will not really pursue collecting the bill against the property owner if the insurance company will not pay (most insurance companies around here will pay a nominal service fee).
On vehicle extrication (Jaws of Life) calls the departments mostly bill the insurance of those at fault and will not pursue collections against the individuals.
On rescue calls (rescue from water, high areas, collapse spaces) we only typically bill the responsible party for items that are single use items. For example in a rescue of a person from a collapsed trench we would bill whoever dug the trench for the wood cut and used to stabilize the trench so we could rescue the person.
On medical calls we work closely with the ambulance companies and get replacement supplies from the ambulance for anything we used on that call so they end up billing the patient for those supplies.
The one call type that every department in this area will bill for is HazMat (Hazardous Materials) calls. The bills for those calls can get real big in a hurry. We bill those by the hour for the apparatus and the firefighters plus our specialized equipment. We also bill for any of our equipment that was used in the contaminated area that could possible absorb the chemicals that would include and fire hose, tarps and our structural turnout gear if it was exposed to the contaminated area.
On an aircraft incident that is anything more than a standby, the call would be handled as a fire and extrication call so, again depending on the department, if anything was billed it would be billed to the insurance.