Private firefighters are often caricatured as nothing more than mansion savers. In reality, they provide valuable services to everyday folks.

Joe Torres’s work protecting his clients’ homes from fires begins long before the first spark.

First, a member of Torres’s team visits for a risk assessment, looking for areas on the property that could be vulnerable during a fire. They’ll then make recommendations about clearing vegetation and creating defensible space, maybe make some suggestions for “hardening” the home — ember-resistant vents, gutter guards.

Torres’s team will also spray long-term fire-retardant on the landscape and sometimes on building surfaces, an added layer of protection if a fire breaks out.

“Putting in the work beforehand is key to success or having a property that’s still standing, potentially, at the end of the day,” said Torres, a firefighter and father of four who founded his California-based fire-protection company, All Risk Shield, in 2013.

Assessing properties, hardening homes, and applying fire-retardant comprises the bulk of the work Torres’s All Risk Shield team does for their clients throughout the year. But their work does not stop at fire prevention; if a blaze does erupt, Torres’s firefighters deploy to protect the homes of clients who’ve signed up for that protection.

Apparently, to some people and mainstream media outlets, this is a problem.

In the wake of the Los Angeles wildfires, which have killed at least 27 people and destroyed more than 12,000 structures, reporters and social-media users have taken aim at private firefighting companies like Torres’s and the people who sign up for their services.

“Private firefighters spark controversy amid devastating LA fires,” read a recent ABC News headline. A Hollywood Reporter headline called private firefighters “a Class War Flashpoint.” The San Francisco Chronicle said the presence of private firefighting teams working to protect their clients’ homes and businesses is “raising questions about equity.”

The Daily Mail reported that “the rich are saving their mansions at the expense of others.” The L.A. fires, according to the British tabloid, exposed “a new financial divide: whether or not you have the access to highly paid private firefighters to ensure that your house may be spared the flames — even as your neighbors’ properties are burnt to a crisp.”

Social-media users roasted online pleas to private firefighting firms for help as “incredibly tone deaf.” When All Risk Shield rushed to protect the home of a client, the Hollywood agent Adam Leber, an X user complained that the “rich suffer zero consequences of anything, even cataclysmic natural disasters.”

“Private and firefighter should not be in the same sentence,” another X user wrote.

Complaints about private firefighters date back at least to 2018’s Woolsey fire, when TMZ reported that Kanye West and Kim Kardashian hired a private firefighting crew to protect their $60-million L.A. mansion. The complaints seem to fall generally into two buckets: that private firefighters are in some way hampering the response of public firefighters, and that fire destruction should be equitably distributed — some might say a schadenfreude desire to see rich people suffer like everyone else.

The complaints about private firefighting evidence a deep misunderstanding of an industry that includes a broad collection of companies who provide a variety of critical services to governments, public utilities, businesses, insurance companies, homeowners associations, and, in some cases, private homeowners. In interviews with National Review, the heads of two Southern California-based fire protection firms who do work with homeowners denied that their clients are mostly ultra-wealthy.

“I wouldn’t say that private firefighting services are for just the rich,” said Chaz Castelo, who runs UrbnTek, a small San Diego-based fire-protection firm, with his father. He said assessing a typical home and applying fire retardant would be between $1,000 and $2,000.

“I do a lot of just common, regular people that live out in kind of the wildland area where there’s a lot more vegetation, and they want to be protected,” he said.

UrbnTek, which has five staffers, specializes in fire preparation; they don’t fight active fires, but “work hand in hand” with All Risk Shield for those services, Castelo said.

Torres denied that his team of firefighters harms the ability of public firefighters. Rather, he said, his team has “invaluable” knowledge of the areas they serve and the properties they work on, which they can relay to fire teams that come from out of the area.

His firefighters can also serve as “force multipliers” during a major blaze, allowing first responders from public agencies to focus on more critical areas.

“Not only do we know the area, but my guys have experience,” Torres said. “Having those guys there gives the ability for public agencies to go, ‘Hey, you guys handle it, we’re going to go get something else, because it’s a higher priority.’”

‘Private’ and ‘Firefighter’ in the Same Sentence

While private firefighting companies like Torres’s have gotten most of the recent attention, and in some cases scorn, they are actually pretty small players in the bigger industry. Private contractors hired directly by private homeowners make up less than 1 percent of the private fire service industry, according to National Wildfire Suppression Association, which represents more than 350 companies in 26 states.

More prominent are private wildland firefighting firms, which contract with state and federal officials and send in firefighters and equipment to supplement government efforts.

Other firms contract with insurance companies, primarily working during the off-season to clear undergrowth, trim trees, and apply fire retardants around insured properties, according to the NWSA.

Then there are companies like Rural Metro Fire, which offers fire suppression, prevention, and inspection services, as well as emergency medical services, in communities primarily in Tennessee, Arizona, and Oregon. Rural Metro is the largest private fire department in the country, said Jeff Bagwell, a company spokesman.

Rural Metro doesn’t supplement government fire services in the communities they serve — they are the fire services in those communities. Rural Metro, for example, provides fire services in unincorporated Knox County, Tenn.

“Knox County as a whole has never paid for fire protection,” Bagwell said. “It’s always been private fire departments.”

The company contracts with individual homeowners, who pay about $450 per year on average to receive full fire and EMS coverage. Though the company relies on year-round subscribers to operate, property owners aren’t required to pay.

“If you’re not a member or a subscriber, we have no way of knowing that,” Bagwell said. “When the 911 call comes in and they send us on the call, we get in the fire truck and we go. We provide the same service, no difference.”

“However,” he added, “if you’re not a member or a subscriber, then you will receive a bill for that service after the fact. And that bill is pretty large.”

Rural Metro doesn’t provide extra services to individual homeowners, but it does have contracts to provide fire services to some industrial properties and utilities, Bagwell said.

Assets or Liabilities?

Torres founded All Risk Shield in 2013, starting out by simply providing customers with information and education about wildfire risk, he said.

“It really just began with doing assessments of the property and then identifying what the highest risk potential would be on their property,” Torres said.

Torres said the 2018 Woolsey fire, which started in Los Angeles County and burned almost 100,000 acres, was a key moment that helped to propel his company forward.

“All my clients’ properties, they all survived that fire,” he said.

All Risk Shield now has a team of about 25 firefighters and 14 trucks.

“Most of my team is made up of retired guys,” Torres said. “They’ve done their 25 to 30 years of fire service. They’re retired and they just want something to do.”

All Risk Shield offers tiers of service. The entry-level tier, Defender 1, which includes a fire assessment and an annual fire-retardant application, starts at about $2,500, Torres said.

One criticism of the overall response to this year’s fires has been that L.A. didn’t initially have enough firefighters to control the blazes before assistance arrived. CNN recently reported that L.A.’s fire department is “among the most understaffed in America.”

Torres said that isn’t because private companies like his are stealing them away. He said he doesn’t pay as much as most public fire departments and can’t offer the same health benefits or growth opportunities. Some young firefighters, he said, will work for a private company like his as a steppingstone to join a public department when a job opens up.

“We’re small. We’re like a family,” Torres said, adding that one benefit of working for All Risk Shield is “we don’t have a whole lot of red tape you have to run through for things.”

During red-flag events, including high-wind events like L.A. has experienced recently, All Risk Shield firefighters pre-deploy and prep their clients’ properties, Torres said. That can include storing outdoor furniture, doing emergency fire-retardant applications, and setting up water pumps that, according to the company’s website, draw water from swimming pools and allow homeowners to “fight the fire with massive blasts of water.”

Some news outlets have suggested that private fire crews are viewed by some of their counterparts in the public sector as liabilities. Not surprisingly, the loudest critics seem to be from public employee unions.

“From the standpoint of first responders, [private fire crews] are not viewed as assets to be deployed,” a spokeswoman for the California Professional Firefighters union told the Los Angeles Times after the Woolsey fire. “They’re viewed as a responsibility.”

Torres denied that his firefighters get in the way of public crews. He said he has liaisons who check in with the incident commander to let that person know what resources they have and where they’re going to be.

“We’re not doing this Wild West, everybody’s doing whatever they want sort of thing,” he said. Rather, he said, the work his crews do to prep their clients’ properties makes the public firefighters’ jobs easier.

“For most of our clients, we do what’s called a bump-and-go strategy. We prepare the property, and then we do a handoff to the authorities,” he said. “Having all that information and having that property prepared, that takes so much of the burden off those first responders. . . . As opposed to going, ‘Oh no, we have to get after it on this property and this property and this property,’ like, no, those have all been prepped, they’re all prepared. Here you go, here’s the information. We’re leaving.”

When they do stay to protect a client’s property, Torres’s firefighters also work to keep fires away from neighboring properties, too. “We want to snuff that out,” he said.

Castelo, from UrbnTek, said that when he’s prepping a client’s property with fire-retardant, he also provides additional protection to neighboring properties.

“I usually spray to the right and to the left into the neighbor’s area to protect everybody,” he said. “I do that all the time.”

Torres also denied that his firefighters tap into public fire hydrants, many of which went dry during the early days of the L.A. fires.

“Those are not for us,” he said. “We utilize the pool water. Usually there’s pools or some other sort of body of water we can get water from.”

He said they also have water tanks on their trucks, which “actually lasts awhile,” he said.

Castelo said he doesn’t think the work that he and Torres does is “unethical at all.”

“The fire department can’t be everywhere at every home,” he said.

He added that he and Torres also provide fire-prep services that public departments don’t.

“We’re providing a service to the common people — rich, poor, or whoever, in an emergency,” he said. “I don’t put anybody to the front of the line.”