§ 78.103.Liability of Volunteer Fire Department

A borrowing provision, and the choice of comparator is the notable part.

A volunteer fire department is liable for damages described by the applicability section only to the extent that a county providing the same or similar services would be liable under Chapter 101, and is entitled to the exclusions, exceptions, and defenses applicable to a county under that chapter and other statutory or common law.

The comparator is a county, fixed by the statute. The nonprofit subchapter measures against the contracting governmental unit, whichever that is; here the answer is always a county, whether the department serves a rural area, a small town, or a district.

That choice has a consequence. A county is a unit of local government under the Tort Claims Act, capped at $100,000 per person and $300,000 per occurrence — not the $250,000 and $500,000 that municipalities and the state carry.

So a volunteer department gets the lower of the two tiers, regardless of who it serves.

The exclusions matter more than the cap. A county is not liable for the failure to provide or the method of providing fire protection, nor for an employee's action responding to an emergency call that complies with the applicable laws or is not taken with conscious indifference. Between them those two remove most claims against a fire department.

"And other statutory or common law" extends the borrowing beyond the Tort Claims Act.