Firefighter/medic and wildland fire contractor. I pull in about 15% of my base tech salary doing a few hours of work a week and one wildland fire deployment per year. It's a hobby that turned into a side profession and feels great to help people.
I'll add statistics for the 2018 fire season that includes southern and northern California [1] at a combined 55,000 acres versus the northwest (WA, OR) of a similar geographic size [2] and atmospheric conditions to Northern CA at over 100,000 acres in prescribed burns.
Im a wldland firefighter from the northern Rockies, just returned from a deployment to the Woolsey incident (LA and Ventura counties).
Yes, prescribed burns are common in the off season for all fire districts. However, CalFire has some unique challenges [1] that most of the other states do not have to deal with when it comes to air quality and sufficient water conditions during their shrinking off season.
https://www.kqed.org/science/1927354/controlled-burns-can-he...
Unless the payload is a mass simulation, even cubesats and nanosats are "real" satellites. The customers for University satellites are typically USAFRL, NASA, or DARPA.
Also factor in most of those calls during the morning and evening, follow-up paperwork time, daily equipment checks, and station maintenance. If you cut the timeframe down to 12 hours busy window, that's 90 minutes per call. Throw a good call in there and they stack up. In my experience, a 24 hour shift with 8-10 calls is just about the max to handle before burnout.
Article mentions the bulk of the bill was a "trauma activation". This is an alert from the EMS units to the hospital that they are bringing a patient with indications of trauma requiring additional medical resources to be diverted. The reaction and resources differ per trauma facility. SFGH is a level 1 center [1]. There are better news sources that describe the trauma system within the context of this story.
My opinion based on limited information within the article is that the field EMS suspected a closed head injury. The trauma "doctors at the hospital quickly determined that baby Jeong Whan was fine". If the baby had an MRI instead of a medical exam by a team of specialists, the headline would lose some weight.
The fee is to staff ED specialists 24/7. I believe the better question is: "should we charge for resources that were used but stood down after initial assessment by the trauma team?" From the perspective of the EMS field, there are protocols that describe tbe patient condition, mechanism of injury and other indicators which dictate a trauma activation.
Cars commonly catch on fire from electrical issues, overheating, malfunctioning or negeglected maintenance on transfer cases or transmissions. We get a car fire at least once a month. This average increases during the summer and does not count semitrucks/trailer fires.
I'm a firefighter for my county that includes ~ 30mi of interstate along a national corridor. DOT has estimated 11,000 vehicles pass through our county each day on this corridor.
The increased risk of cancer is a big downside.
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/firefighters/health.html