It almost sounds like something out of a Hollywood plotline—as the hills above Boulder blaze, an unknown team of elite firefighters quietly breaches the evacuation area to save the homes of their super wealthy clients. Their work done, they disband with no one being the wiser.

The actual deployment of the 13 wildland firefighters, hired by Chubb Insurance to protect the homes of select clients from Boulder’s Fourmile Fire, was probably less dramatic. It did, however, have the distinction of being Colorado’s first fire to mingle public responders with those employed by an insurance company, according to the Boulder Daily Camera.

Along with that distinction comes the question of whether such a mix is the cutting edge of risk management or a just asking for trouble.

"Wow, I'm impressed," Gold Hill resident and fire victim Greg Cortopassi told the Camera. "I think it's an incredibly active stance. This is something that I'd like to see the other companies moving forward with."

But he added that private firefighters would need to steer clear of those whose job was to stop the blaze, regardless of whose home was burning. "You can get in the way and not actually do anything helpful," he said.

Concerns about private protection getting in the way of public good has been cropping up for the last few years, ever since a handful of insurers such as AIG, the Fireman’s Fund, and Chubb started contracting private firefighters to look after assets.

“Insurance company fire engines need to stay out of our way,” Thom Walsh of the U.S. Forest Service told the Associated Press in 2008. “We don't know who they are or where they are. They're like the private mercenaries in Iraq.”

In the Fourmile Fire, that wasn’t the case. The Chubb firefighters had a prior agreement with Boulder County that allowed them to work in the fire zone to prevent clients' homes from catching fire through fuel mitigation and other "pre-suppression" activities, according to the Camera article. They weren’t allowed to fight structural fires and weren’t considered first responders, but they took their orders from incident command like others on the scene.

“We don't do anything without approval from incident command,” Chubb spokesman Dave Hilgen told the Camera. “We don't move.”

Even when responders aren’t worried about stepping on each other’s toes, there could still be drawbacks to bringing private-sector resources into a field served largely by the public, according to an op-ed in the Boston Globe.

“An increasing role for private firms in basic safety services such as fire and police protection prompts concern over training procedures, reliability, and accountability,” writes author Peter Funt. “Moreover, privatization can lead to a spiral in which reduced public services cause increased private involvement, which, in turn, leads to even more cuts in public funding.”

Be that as it may, the insurance privatization trend—which ironically hearkens back to the earliest U.S. firefighting groups—is expected to grow, according to Carole Walker of the Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association.

“As the wildfire threat has grown across the country, you're seeing these types of added protections crop up,” she told the Camera. “It's another example of what insurance companies are doing to market themselves in a competitive marketplace.”