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Firefighters at the Boylston Street station came back from working the parade to find their cars damaged by clods sitting and standing on them

Local 718 posted photos today of firefighters' cars at Engine 33 and Ladder 15 at Boylston and Hereford streets after the firefighters "returned to the firehouse to find their personal vehicles severely damaged and vandalized."

One of the vehicles had "Sorry" scrawled on the windshield in blue marker along with what appeared to be people's signatures. The pictures show people using the vehicles to sit or stand atop during the parade.

The majority of those in attendance on Friday managed to find a way to conduct themselves appropriately; others, however, apparently couldn’t figure it out.

The union asks anybody who knows the people who damaged firefighters' cars at the station to call police.

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Comments

Long overdue for laws on all governmental levels to be changed for the tougher for anyone who does wrong by a firefighter. I hope these assholes' get burnt by to a crisp .

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Oh stop it, stop it right now, firefighters and Boston firefighters in particular already get away with much the average Bostonian can't. The BFD and BPD already have enough protected status. Oh and don't forget the MSP.

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Another boost to the city economy or some scorned soul?

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Tell me you don't know how anything works without telling me.

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37

Firefighters are true superheroes, how ever disrespects that is a fool.

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Social decadence is real. Uncivilized people have no manners.

Next time, BPD should either assign police officers to that location, or Local 718 should hire detail cops.

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That's a long way to go to say drunk and disorderly.

Surely unique to our time. Surely.

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And every time someone tried to climb up on the fence, a (ranger? security guard?) came over and told them to knock it off. None of the dozens of cops I saw all along the parade route seemed interested in doing anything other than chatting in clusters and collecting OT. Maybe the firemen should have asked the cemetery guards for some help.

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… tell smokers to stop smoking or they will be fined. I’ve always been impressed with that.

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cuz park rangers actually do their job.

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The one where beating, robbing, and killing gay people carried no penalty.

The one where you could beat a "vagrant" to death with your buddies for fun and nobody saw anything.

The one where you could rape a woman and call it a date.

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We don't have that. Only marches in support of murderers and rapists on Boston campuses.

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That would be what happened when Europeans first encountered peoples across the globe and thought rape and murder and pillaging were "civilizing" them.

This is property damage.

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Isn't this why they closed parking on all those streets? Were these cars parked in the no parking zone? Might mess up the insurance claim.

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You could read the article.

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Which is reserved for Boston firefighters. Nice try though, whatever you are trying to accomplish by suggesting the victims are at fault here.

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I am not blaming them. Its just like when construction workers put up no parking signs and then park in the closed place. If something from the work site falls on a pickup truck in a no parking zone, does insurance cover it? Do you think they outlawed parking so people could see better?

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It looks like it should be a no-parking zone - being an intersection.
...also...
It looks like the same official-BTD-looking signs saying NO PARKING RESERVED FOR FIRE DEPARTMENT VEHICLES ONLY that are used around the corner on Hereford St.

There must be at least 8 fire fighters on shift there at any one time, maybe 10 or 12, right? A few street spots reserved along the side on Hereford, not much room in the alley behind the building, not much they can alter with it being an historic building (and structural issues). BFD should be providing parking somehow (maybe in the yuge parking garage that is literally one block away on Dalton, get a half-dozen spots set aside) but that would entail spending money.

It may also get into Union contract, whether the Dept is required to provide or reimburse parking. It would be interesting to compare how shift parking is dealt with at another downtown station, like the one along the Surface Road near Congress Street.

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Back in 2002 there hadn't been a parade in nearly two decades, and we really didn't know what to do. The Pats won, and they had a rally on City Hall Plaza, and it was a junk show. It was the coldest day of an otherwise balmy winter. No one knew how many people would come and it was underestimated. The T, while overall less of a mess, was overrun. Rather than a "rolling rally", the team rode the Duck Boats to a rally on City Hall Plaza with speeches that basically no one could hear and many couldn't see.

Anyway, at one point I was standing pretty far from anything but someone nearby realized that if they climbed on top of a 15-passenged BPD van, they had a good view of the stage. Pretty quickly, a dozen or more of their friends did the same thing. Then the roof of said van went from convex to concave, a cop came over and yelled at them to get off the van (probably with some adjectives thrown in not appropriate for a legitimate news site like Universal Hub) and they were shooed off.

So 22 years ago (god I'm old) the cops learned not to park vehicles along the parade route. I guess they never told BFD.

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It's even more absurd than that. The spaces in these pictures were a) never legal to begin with and b) although BTD seems to have seen fit to tow any other vehicles along the parade route, they seem to have made their usual exception for BFD vehicles, with extremely predictable results.

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That is what crowds do. There is always property damage. Get over it.

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No, climbing on top of people's cars and caving in the hood and roof because you put your own desire to get a better view ahead of the other person's right not to have their property destroyed isn't "what crowds do," it's what sociopathic individuals do.

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…. the Women’s March 2017.
Just some left over signs leaning against fences.

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While I'm not saying anybody deserves to have their vehicle damaged, this seems a predictable result of leaving vehicles parked right in the middle of an expected throng of people? This pic in particular shows the absurdity: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=767631955532207&set=pcb.76764723553....

Maybe on this one day take the T to your post rather than leave your car parked on a street that has quite reasonably been cleared of all other cars for exactly this reason?

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"Don't leave your car parked in public if you don't want it to be vandalized" sounds a lot like "don't wear short skirts if you don't want to be harassed." Victim blaming is never the correct response to criminal misbehavior.

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Nobody should be blaming them. They did everything right. The people who climbed on their cars should be found and punished.

I wish them all the luck in the world using our justice system to be fairly compensated for the damage done by the criminal elements within the revelers that damaged their vehicles that had every right to be in the middle of the crowd gathering area on the side of the parade route.

That having been said...*I* would have found somewhere else to park that day if I were in their shoes. It would be far less work on my part than what they have ahead of themselves now if they are going to figure out who did what and how to get those people to remunerate them for the damages as well as deal with insurance and the loss of use of their vehicles while they get them fixed and so on. But that's just the practicality in me...if I, again in their shoes, would have chosen to park there, I'd completely expect the system to do everything possible to make sure anyone who trespassed against me was found responsible after months of investigation, case building, court delays, and so on.

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Firefighters don't work a nine to five shift, or change shifts at transit-friendly hours.

Actually, that's a problem with the T ... assuming people do have standard work hours.

I know some Cambridge FD who bike, but that isn't always possible.

The city should have found/provided secure parking for essential workers during the event.

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That and the trashed MBTA will buff off right away.

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Can a gofundme be started they were on the job rightfully parked people are just plain ignorant

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There’s a thing that is just like godundme, except that instead of stepping up with a donation when something bad happens to someone, people put in a little money up front, and then, when any participant suffers a loss, the administrator of the pooled fund pays out to the participant who suffered the loss.

Personally, I have paid thousands of dollars into such a fund and I am very confident that the firefighters whose cars were damaged are also participants, and that the fund will pay a signi share of their losses.

I see absolutely no reason for me to pay further into a gofundme in this case.

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Didn't they get the memo that we were expecting a million drunken suburban chucklefucks for the parade? They parked at ground zero and the completely predictable happened. This is right up there with being surprised if you get mugged after walking around Mass and Cass at midnight with earbuds in waving a huge wad of cash around.

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Or Boston Common at 8pm

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[Boston] is the less ...
Never send to know for whom the [fire] bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

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