If we continually needed more firefighters, and the government either refused to hire them or couldn't afford them, so a volunteer group took up the cause and got people to donate money for trucks and volunteer their time to fight fires...this would cover up the problem sufficiently so that it would seem like "we only need to have enough firefighters to get to zero casualties relating to fire". Which means that we would not have a focus on improving the bad building and furniture regulations.

Sometimes you need people to see how bad things truly are, before you can get the resources to fix them at the root.