In London, firefighters worked explicitly for insurance companies during the 18th and 19th centuries. “Each insurance company maintained its own fire brigade, which extinguished fires in those buildings insured by the company and, in return for a fee to be paid later, in buildings insured by other companies,” the economist Annelise Anderson has written.

Read: The simple reason that humans can’t control wildfires

The United States might have been expected to inherit a similar system, but instead, volunteer fire departments became the most common means of fire protection. Insurers might give bonuses or other support to these groups, but firefighting was primarily a civic rather than commercial enterprise. These fire clubs were important social institutions, often commingling middle-class and working-class men of many ethnicities in the virtuous activity of defending their city from conflagration, according to the historian Amy Greenberg’s Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City.

David Torgerson, the president of Wildfire Defense Systems, disputed any characterization of his particular company as fighting fires only on behalf of the rich. Ninety percent of the homes they protect, he said, were “average-value homes,” contracted through normal insurers, not the specialty companies that take on high-net-worth individuals’ properties. “If the fire hits Malibu, there will be a lot of high-value houses,” Torgerson told me. “If it hits somewhere in Utah, there won’t be.” In either case, he says, Wildfire Defense Systems will respond. Many types of regular old fire insurance can come with his company’s service. “We serve nearly a dozen [insurance companies],” he said. “If anybody wants to have this supplemental response capability during a fire, they need to pick an insurance company that has it.”

“There are not that many solutions in climate change,” he argued. “If we have a growing problem with wildfire—and it is statistically getting worse—why limit the ability to bring resources that the taxpayer doesn’t have to pay for and policyholders don’t have to pay for?”

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In the 19th century, there were obvious reasons for residents to fight fires all together. Great calamities of many kinds wiped out huge chunks of people and property within new industrial cities. The Stanford historian Richard White calls the rough-hewn communal politics of these urbanities “a democracy of defecation.” “Like feces and urine, neither fire nor disease respected property boundaries,” White wrote in The Republic for Which It Stands. “Water and sewer systems had to cover and protect everyone. Cities were like ships; they sailed, and sank, as a whole.”

And thus the first metropolitan fire services were born. Professionals, paid by the city, took over from the volunteers. They got a push from the new technological possibilities of steam engines, which reduced the need for human labor but required more specialized technicians to operate them. Pro firefighters were needed, and municipal governments centralized the power to wield them and the funds to pay them.