Putting up a shop in CA - fire department being a pain

Nobody lives forever, that's for sure. But there are plenty of completely preventable/mitagatable situations that can kill you that could be mitigated by a professional paid fire response that won't be mitigated by many volunteer departments, by no real fault of their own. And whether you like it or not, that level of professional service costs money.

If you don't know the difference in the level of service maybe you don't ever think about it. But I guarantee if you're watching a loved one die, wondering why your volunteer department isn't there yet while knowing for a fact that if you'd been in an area served by a professional department your loved one would already be getting help, you'd probably rather have paid the money for the professionals. I doubt you'd be standing there going "well, them's the breaks".

And yes, if I'm going to run into a burning building to try and save somebody because I got there fast enough that someone inside is still viable I don't want to be maimed/killed because the owner didn't understand that building and fire code exists for a reason, and that reason isn't just to inconvenience them. And sure, yeah, some of those codes have political motivations. But most fire code is there because somebody died. If I'm showing up at 10+ minutes and just putting water on it from the front yard, well, the building construction doesn't much matter anymore because it's already toast anyway. But the money you saved isn't gonna be enough to make up the difference at that point either.
Exactly, we've had numerous fires where I'm at and the response is unbelievably good. We had a recent small one and helicopters, engines and hand crews knocked it out quickly.
Earlier in the year a car accident on the 2 lane State Highway required Air tankers/retardant, helicopters, engines and hand crews. Evacuation was recommended but not mandatory and luckily the coordination of US Forest Service, BLM, Kern County Fire knocked it down.

Unfortunately the historic town of Havilah was lost this year as the the nature of the fire and smoke negated air support.

The Erskine fire a few years ago took out over 600 homes.

I'd hate to be the screw that was responsible for any damage to OTHER people's property and their taxpayers ***.