Does the fire department charge?
 

Say if you call them and they come over in a hurry to look over something but there is no fire, do they charge you (by sending a bill later)?

when you call 911, they will ask you what the problem is, and then contact you to the fire department. then they will ask you whats wrong and i guess they will go from there.
i had a house fire before, and they did not charge, however it was a real fire.
if it is a legitimate reason such as having reason to believe there might be a emergency, i do not believe they WOULD charge you unless it was for a stupid reason.

I believe they do charge. I remember accidentally hitting the fire alarm with a volleyball in elementary school and remember them saying somethign about for every false alarm, it costs the school $50 or something. Not sure if it was more.

My neighbour was charged like $300 for calling them when she was drunk trying to get into her house.... Idiot.
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LOL "hitting the fire alarm with a volleyball" ;)

i remember it was $500


and wtf is so important that you need the fire department to come look at?... if you call 911 for that, its likely they'll fine you for misuse of emergency services, i think theres even a criminal charge for it if you do it too many times

Yea, its $500 and not $50.

how can this even happen? you have to pull the lever which is covered by a glass..

Not all of them are covered in glass. But also, it does seem far fetched that a volleyball could get at a recessed lever.

Doesn't have to pull the lever, just has to break that glass rod to set it off.

My elementary school didn't have the glass thing covering it. This was back in 2000 or so. It was horrible, literally first minute of PE class, teacher told us to grab a partner and practice, I served it to my partner....yelled his name to run for it....went over his head...knocked the lever down and that was the end of PE class for that day...Assembed ourselves at the school field...fire trucks came...I stepped out infront of the whole school and walked away with the firemen to show them where it was and what happened....

Edit: This is what the old school ones looked like:
http://www.unlikelymoose.com/blog/20...alarm_1628.jpg

Yes you get charged if it was a false alarm. Their reasoning is, what if someone at the same time, while rushing to you, actually has a real problem and they just wasted time coming (possibly lead to death)