The average fire engine costs close to 1 million dollars now. The average fire truck, with the 100’ aerial ladder needed for fighting many large commercial building fires like some of your shop buildings would be, are closer to 3 million each. A decent sized shop, well involved with fire might easily require 3-5 fire engines, 2 trucks and upwards of 30 firefighters to extinguish.
And of course, it’s not like you’re building shelter. You’re building a shop for your hobby, where you will likely be doing stuff like welding, working with flammable chemicals, storing fuel, tires, and whatever other highly flammable items you can stuff in there. So the risk of fire is much higher than a regular old house and the risks of fighting that fire are exponentially higher.
So you don’t want to pay, because you’re cheap bastards. But I bet if your shop catches fire you probably still want the fire dept to show up and put it out right? And show up fast enough and fight fire aggressively enough to keep that fire out of your home? Your neighbors home? You’d want them to evacuate your family if you or your neighbors weren’t home when that happened right? Of course you do.
I’ve been a professional firefighter for over 20 years. I’ve been burned, broken bones, torn cartilage, had surgery, collapsed from exhaustion, pulled muscles and generally abused my body to save people’s lives, property, etc. I’ve watched several of my coworkers die from cancer, some of whom were younger than me. And watched many more fight cancer despite being young and healthy individuals that don’t have history or risk factors beyond the carcinogens they’re exposed to in this job.
So yeah, building your shop costs some money. And yeah, we got tired of risking our lives fighting fire in some death trap that some moron built cheap in his backyard, so there’s fire code you have to follow so we don’t die because of your stupidity. We don’t get to pick and choose which fires we go to, we go to all of them.
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@ESP47, I would suggest getting ahold of whoever is doing the plan review at South Placer Fire. They should be willing to explain what they need and why, and if there are any exemptions or variances that your particular project might qualify for. A lot of that stuff is required per code based on property size or square footage, so sometimes it pops up on projects that don’t necessarily need some of that stuff for other reasons.