WTAF? I hope this is just dry humor and not a serious question 
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Well, they might cost too much! /s
If they are not self-insured (a possibility, as @FGD135 points out) then the only discussion that will matter is the one with their insurer.
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In fairness; this seems like a situation where treating it as a discussable matter doesn’t seem absurd:
Going by @FGD135’s analysis it sounds like the building may already have had ‘fire alarms’ in the basic “local smoke detectors that encourage anyone inside to not be” sense; just not ones that phone home to emergency services; and the fire was not detected because it was just a storage building at a time when nobody was present.
My (layman’s) understanding is that fire engines are not inexpensive pieces of hardware; and it wouldn’t be a total surprise if their insurers have strong and self-interested opinions on what storage standards(in terms of fire protection, theft risk, etc.) are required to retain coverage; which might well make whatever connected alarms cost look like a pittance by comparison; but, ultimately, an unoccupied storage building burned down with nobody inside; that’s very much a “what do the numbers say about the costs and benefits of varying levels of safety” situation.
It’s where the externalities start piling up; or in life-critical situations; that you really need to give the bean-counters a hard shake and tell them that certain outcomes simply are not acceptable, period.
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In principle, yes, but as others have mentioned in passing, German municipal stuff tends to be “self-insured”, i.e., we hope for the best and when the worst happens we will somehow find the money to replace the stuff in question.
Having said that, German towns and cities are required by law to finance fire departments – either volunteer ones or, in larger cities, professional ones with 24/7 coverage, so saying that it’s too bad that the fire engines all burned and we will do without any for the time being is not an option; they must be replaced ASAP. The newspaper said that 10 vehicles were damaged or destroyed in the fire, so this is probably one of the larger volunteer fire departments, presumably a Stützpunktfeuerwache, which in addition to its usual duties provides specialist equipment and services that the smaller fire departments in the surrounding towns and villages don’t keep on hand, and may even have a few full-time employees living on or near the premises. Of course these may have been elsewhere at the time; their job would be to maintain the equipment during normal working hours, not to provide a round-the-clock presence for callouts.
I presume that fire engines, like all motor vehicles in Germany that are allowed on public roads, have to carry statutory liability insurance in case the fire engine damages another vehicle, but insuring the vehicle itself against external damage not caused by other vehicles (e.g., a tree falling on it, or it catching fire) is entirely optional. Therefore it would come as no surprise whatsoever to hear that there are no external insurers for the fire engines and hence, no stipulations as to how they are to be stored when not in use.
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Does being ‘self-insured’ tend to mean, in practice, that problem is just treated as ‘solved, worry about later’; or does the ‘insuring’ entity get any abilities analogous to those of external insurers(particularly the ones that handle larger projects, not the various flavors of consumer insurance that are often heavily codified or legally restricted) to insist that certain risks are just unacceptable if you want coverage?
I can definitely see the appeal of self-insuring if your size and/or access to credit on favorable terms are large enough relative to the scale of the potential problem; paying someone a cut to take your money month after month and then bullshit you when you actually need them to hold up their end of the contract is profoundly wearisome in a way that’s equal parts enraging and depressing; but there are some cases where having meaner, more vicious, bean counters telling your bean counters that if they dare pinch that penny they can forget about being able to find a policy with premiums they can afford encourages better practice.
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Even more tragic, firefighters brought to the local hospital were left untreated for hours because all the doctors were home sick that day.
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My limited experience of insurance markets in UK suggests that large municipal authorities employ (either in-house or as external consultants) risk managers, a main part of whose job is to assess which risks are worth insuring commercially and which risks can be kept in-house (self-insured). Self-insurance can mean “ignore the problem until it occurs” but should really mean “assess the reserves/capital resources as well as ease of access to external capital that the organisation has, and manage risk and insurance accordingly”.
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