Is the firefighter's rule applicable to highway workers?

Both risks are "inherent" (and highly foreseeable) in the performance of the required duties of these two types of public employee--the firefighter and the highway worker. Yet there is a duty toward one and no duty toward the other. Why? The answer can be extracted from prior decisions. The firefighter's rule has always been narrowly circumscribed to apply to public employees whose primary duty is to confront and attempt to remedy some known highly dangerous condition. And among public employees, at least, [16 Cal.App.4th 1446] those dangerous conditions thus far have been limited to fire and crime with only firefighters and crime fighters (i.e., police) excluded from tort recovery by the firefighter's rule. (Hubbard v. Boelt (1980) 28 Cal.3d 480, 169 Cal.Rptr. 706, 620 P.2d 156 [extending firefighter's rule to police officers].) Highway workers, in contrast, are employed to perform a task which carries perhaps equal risks of injury. But they are not asked to confront and remedy those dangers. The dangers, that is the

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