§ 78.104.Liability of Volunteer Fire Fighter

The individual counterpart, in the same borrowing form.

A volunteer fire fighter is liable for damages described by the applicability section only to the extent that an employee providing the same or similar services for a county would be liable, and is entitled to the exclusions, exceptions, immunities, and defenses applicable to an employee of a county under the Tort Claims Act and other statutory or common law.

Note the extra word. The department provision lists exclusions, exceptions, and defenses; this one adds immunities — because official immunity belongs to individuals rather than to entities, and it is the protection that matters most here.

A volunteer fire fighter is a member, not an employee, and would ordinarily fall outside the Tort Claims Act entirely — its definition of "employee" requires paid service. This section supplies by reference what the definition would deny.

The comparator is a county employee doing similar work, so the standard is what a paid county firefighter would face.

Read across the chapter, four provisions place volunteer and nonprofit fire personnel in the governmental position: the department and the individual, in each of the two subchapters. The chapter's remaining section then extends all of it to training.