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BURN Trailer from Tremolo Productions on Vimeo.

While the controversy over ABC’s new drama Detroit 1-8-7 continues to garner national headlines, the filmmakers behind the documentary Burn, about the city’s beleaguered fire department, are asking for donations to fund their project. Last Tuesday’s spate of house fires put the Detroit Fire Department’s struggles front and center in many Detroiter’s minds. Whether that translates into grassroots funding for Burn remains to be seen, but people are talking about this latest chapter in Detroit’s peculiar relationship with fire.

The Detroit News reports at least one east side resident hopes his community will recover from Tuesday's fires.

"They need to tear all this down and rebuild it again," the 27-year-old [Lee] Andrew said while walking on Moenart Street on the city's east side. "It is so sad."

Meanwhile, some residents and activists continue to blame the fires on DTE Energy’s inattention to downed power lines and illegal hook-ups. Deputy Mayor Saul Green is uncomfortable with assigning blame:

Green said "it doesn't make sense at this point to start pointing fingers and trying to assess blame."

Firefighters argue that budget cuts negatively impacted their ability to effectively respond Tuesday as fires spread. City officials appear to agree. The Bing Administration is seeking an $11,000,000 federal grant to bolster the fire department. Daniel McNamara, president of the Detroit Firefighters Association, tells the Detroit Free Press’ Rochelle Riley that he’s warned the city about just this kind of disaster.

"The government's job is to serve taxpayers and that's not happening," he said. "We've been telling administration after administration that this was going to happen. Not to be a naysayer, but we had to call in help from six cities. This was not a natural disaster. It was the first time we were not able to handle it."

And Riley backs up McNamara’s concerns with some telling statistics.

It is not naysaying or picking on Detroit to realize that 988 firefighters and 66 companies are too few for a city that still covers 140 square miles and has 800,000 people living in and around 2-million-people worth of buildings.

Those numbers seem to support calls to shrink, or at least re-align, Detroit’s physical footprint. However, Jack Lessenberry says the city should grow, rather than shrink, to deal Detroit’s struggle to deliver basic city services:

Elastic cities are those which can add territory, like Los Angeles. Detroit hasn’t been able to. It is surrounded by other incorporated cities. So here’s what we should do.

The legislature should order the merger of Detroit and Wayne County. This has worked in places like Miami, Indianapolis and Nashville. True, it would cost suburbanites money, in the short term. It would cost Detroiters some political power. But Michigan would soon have a stronger, healthier and more vibrant major city.