Right, and have a strike (and possibly lawsuit) on their hands for promoting unpaid labor. And frankly, I wouldn't blame the strikers.
If not, I'd say they have a different pattern of activity than almost any other municipal work: plenty of downtime with unpredictable peaks that might require huge numbers of people at a very short notice. This makes hiring professionals a huge waste except in large cities, because they'll be twiddling their thumbs most of the time.
Fire depts are not sitting around twiddling their thumbs. Plenty of work to be done. To respond to a lot more than just fires too FYI.
Volunteer firefighters are there to help out in areas not served by firefighters such as being out in a super rural area or when theres a big fire and there simply isn't enough staff, like wildfires. They're not volunteering to take away someones job. Some of them are just retired firefighters or veterans that want to look out for their community.
Right. But why are those areas not served by a professional team? Because there isn't enough work to keep them busy.
Same thing with wildfires; you might need 20x more people during a wildfire than the rest of the time. It's not like you couldn't hire 20x professional firefighters to handle them - it's just that it would be a huge waste the rest of the time, as I said.
My point is that firefighting is not like pothole fixing - there's no such thing as a wildfire of potholes. Which is why municipalities supporting volunteer firefighters makes sense, whereas supporting volunteer pothole fixers doesn't, in my opinion.
No, you get a lot of potholes. That's annoying, but nobody will die if the fixers take a few days to fix them.
My knowledge of the pnw pothole situation is irrelevant to my point.