My fire-rescue pager went off at 5:45 p.m. Monday, summoning me to respond to a flooded residence. As soon as we’d finished pumping that out, we were “toned” to another storm-related rescue call, power lines down and sparking in the rain. I worked all night, only to wake to the news that flash flooding had devastated not only the Hudson Valley where I volunteer as a fire-rescue operator, resulting in one death, but also much of New England. In Vermont, floods swamped the capital and forced responders to rescue at least 117 people from their homes and vehicles.
This natural disaster is the type we can expect more frequently as climate change advances, and it’s not alone. As of June 2, insurance giants State Farm and Allstate announced they would no longer issue home insurance policies in California. The main reason? Increasing threat of wildfires, brought on by climate change.
The majority of those responding to these climate disasters, from floods to hurricanes, to fires, are volunteers. Volunteers provide more than 70 percent of the fire and rescue service in this country. In New York state, outside of urban areas, that number jumps to 93 percent. When you remove the “hybrid” departments that mix both paid personnel (usually in the more technically demanding positions, like drivers for the rigs who can also operate the complex pumps) and volunteers, less than 10 percent of fire services in America are provided by “career” firefighters—paid personnel who dedicate themselves to this critical discipline full-time.
If you live in a city, where firefighters tend to be salaried, this may seem strange, but you notice the rarity of paid firefighters as soon as you leave town. I serve in a volunteer department within commuter distance of New York City. I previously worked as a volunteer in Metairie, Louisiana, just outside the New Orleans city limits.
For most firefighters and rescue operators, it’s a part-time gig, squeezed into the rare free hours in our wildly busy lives. We carry pagers or do shift work, turning from our demanding jobs and family obligations at a moment’s notice to wrestle into our gear, remember our training, and go to work. Fire-rescue work is intensely technical, complex, and intricate. To do it well, you need to know everything from fluid dynamics to chemistry, details of building construction and the mechanics of airflow, how to operate a huge range of gear from hoses to lights to pumps to a bewildering array of hand tools. You have to remember how to cut, pry, patch wounds, calm and transport victims, use proper radio protocol, tie knots (yes, we use knots like Boy Scouts), direct traffic, and tap into a wide array of other skills from small engine repair to decontamination techniques. You have to utilize all of these skills under intense pressure, sometimes after being wakened out of a deep sleep in the wee hours of the night, and knowing that lives (including yours) are on the line. Most of the time, if you mess any of this up, it’s more or less fine. Some of the time, if you mess it up, people die.
This system serves so well that most people don’t even notice. Pretty much everyone I know expresses shock when they read that “more than 70 percent volunteer” statistic. On its face, we’re doing great. “Structural” fire incidents, fires in any kind of building, trended down 5 percent over the previous decade, as of 2021. This shows that our volunteer system is working to prevent and contain fires. But there are four main developments that warn of glaring holes in the volunteer system’s ability to keep up.
Climate change: State Farm and Allstate’s decision is unsurprising, given climate change’s undeniable impact on the accelerating pace of wildland fire incidents in America, which have been increasing steadily in frequency and size of burned area. Fire seasons are starting earlier and lasting longer. The State Farm decision shows that wildland fires don’t stop in the woods. They jump what we call the “wildland urban interface,” threatening homes and businesses to an increasing degree. The sluggish global response to climate change doesn’t provide a lot of hope that this trend will reverse anytime soon.
Building construction: Overall fire incidents in structures may be down, but the increasing use of “lightweight” synthetic materials as well as increasing energy efficiency in construction means that fires are burning hotter and faster, releasing greater volumes of toxic gases, and making buildings more likely to collapse. All of this makes it more difficult and more dangerous to fight fires.
Most people picture firefighters standing as we operate hose lines, squinting through gray smoke. In reality, we often crawl on our bellies trying to avoid rising heat, working entirely blind in clouds of black smoke produced by burning plastics and synthetic textiles, sucking air from our bottles to avoid inhaling superheated carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and hydrogen cyanide. Roofs supported by increasingly common laminated wooden I-beams fail terrifyingly quickly when exposed to fire, vastly reducing the time available to get victims and firefighters out of the collapse zone.
(It’s worth noting that the same study showing structural fire incidents declining 5 percent showed dollar losses increasing 11 percent, and deaths increasing 8 percent. These percentages may indicate that new construction methods and materials are causing hotter and faster-burning fires, as well as more rapid structural failure. This means more of the building and its contents are consumed more quickly, resulting in greater damage and greater risk of death.)
The rise of alternative fuel vehicles: My work related to the flash floods is a reminder that firefighters don’t just fight fires. We’re usually the first responders on scene to respond to motor vehicle accidents and perform “extrication,” cutting victims out of crumpled cars so trained emergency medical responders can get to them to perform their lifesaving work. Sometimes, we’re the trained emergency medical responders ourselves.
The massive proliferation of electric and other alternative-fueled vehicles on the road vastly complicates this work, adding yet another layer of technical skills to the bevy we already have to memorize and practice in our spare time. “Taking utilities” (disabling the car battery and securing leaking fuel) is one of the first things we do on scene. But how do you disconnect the battery on a Tesla? On a Prius? What do you do when there are two batteries? What do you do when there are six? Did you get them all? Cutting the battery lead on a 2010 Nissan Sentra might throw a small spark. Cutting the high voltage power cable on a Tesla could kill you. Rescue operations are tense affairs where seconds could make the difference between saving and losing a victim. It’s the kind of pressure that increases the risk that a part-time volunteer might make a mistake.
The decline of volunteerism: An already downward-trending pattern in American volunteerism, driven partly by declining religious affiliation, changes in family demographics, and the aging of baby boomers, was exacerbated by the pandemic and the recent crisis of faith in civic institutions . This has decimated volunteering, hitting the fire and rescue service particularly hard, with a 32 percent decline in personnel from 1998 to 2021 in New York alone, leading to the formation of a special task force to address the problem.
The tight relationship between firefighters and police makes matters even more challenging. Every fire-rescue station I’ve been in displays a “thin blue line” flag, and almost every personal vehicle in every fire station lot sports a bumper sticker expressing messages of support for “our brothers and sisters in blue.” This necessarily drops volunteer firefighters into the post–George Floyd great American debate on police abuse of power, and this partisanship may not be helping, given the variety of political leanings in young people we need to recruit to take up this physically demanding job.
Any one of these factors would be concerning. Taken together, they point to a gathering storm. The vast majority of fire responses I run are what we affectionally call “bullshit calls”: automatic alarms set off by harmless steam or paint fumes, or minor car accidents where the unhurt driver and their dinged bumper are safely on their way before we get to the station, leaving us “canceled on the apron”—dismounting the truck and stowing our gear before we even have a chance to hit the sirens. But every once in a while, we “catch a real job,” a structure or wildland fire where lives and property are at stake. These jobs are increasing in complexity and difficulty at the very moment when our numbers are dwindling, increasing the pressure on those of us who actually show up.
Because sometimes we don’t show up. What most folks don’t understand is that volunteer firefighters don’t have to come to work. We can blow off our shifts. We can ignore our pagers. In any volunteer department, there is a small core of dedicated idealists who take the work seriously, showing up consistently to fight fires, attending drills and administrative meetings, pursuing training. But many volunteers are “social members” who get the T-shirt and don’t do the work. As volunteerism declines, the strain on the small, working core grows. Worse, the personnel who are certified in the truly complex skills—like driving a half-million-dollar fire truck or operating its intricate pump panel, where a faulty estimate on water pressure could get someone killed—are declining. I have lost count of the number of times in my volunteer career when a full crew of firefighters responded in time to an alarm, only to stand idly in our truck bay because no certified drivers answered the call.
There is an obvious solution to this problem—follow the example of many other countries and professionalize the fire service nationwide, investing in paid, full-time personnel who can truly be held accountable for their performance, and don’t have to split their attention between their income-earning profession and the demands of the fire service. This isn’t cheap. The cost of professionalizing New York state alone would run around $4.7 billion dollars. At a minimum, part-time pay and increased benefits for current volunteers could help create accountability and also incentivize greater dedication to the work. Indeed, New York is currently investigating just such measures.
Such costs may seem like a high price now, but the trends I highlight above aren’t going away. I wonder if our refusal to pay might not seem penny-wise, but pound-foolish, in the years to come.