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Comment by toast0 | Hacker News Reader

> Why are firefighters volunteers anyway instead of getting paid?

In urban/suburban areas, you need firefighters based on number of population, more or less, which isn't too bad to pay for, more people means a little bit from everyone adds up.

For rural areas, you need figherfighters based on area. If you had the right per capita fire equipment and personnel, they'd be spread so thin they may as well not exist. Volunteerism at least gets you affordable personnel, but you still need to fundraise for equipment and operational expenses.

Edit: also, the call volume is very low. Your properly staffed fire department would be nearly always idle. With volunteers on call, they can just go about thei usual things, and if a call comes in, they can respond from where they are.

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> the call volume is very low

I lived near a volunteer station in a New Jersey town where it is routine to use a siren (same as used for tornadoes in other parts of the country) to alert the volunteers to check in. It went off frequently every day.

I can't speak for the department near you, but in many departments, particularly towns/more rural areas, the fire department/fire station responds to both medical and fire calls. It very well may be the majority of responses were medical in nature. For example, 70% of NYFD call volume is medical [1].

[1]: https://www.firerescue1.com/fdny/should-nyc-split-ems-from-f...

> It went off frequently every day.

Most fire department dispatches are for medical events (i.e., they're also doing paramedic work). On average, fire departments get about the same false-alarm fire dispatches and real-alarm dispatches.

* https://www.firefighternation.com/firerescue/declining-membe...

I’ve got an idea:

Every city and county belongs to a state with a broader tax base. Every state is a part of the richest country in the world. I’m sure you see where I’m getting at here.

But rural America calls that “socialism”.

Volunteers getting together to serve the needs of their own community is thoroughly socialist, you are talking in circles.

Is voluntary self-organized service socialist, communist, libertarian, or something else?

How well is that working out? Poor people trying to buy equipment made by people who expect to get paid?

Guess how many fundraisers I heard about when I lived in Johns Creek GA - with a median income of $150K?

What are you talking about? Johnsons Creek has a population of 80,000 people making it larger than 98% of US cities. I live in a town of less than 10,000 surrounded by a county larger than Rhode Island that has huge forest fires at least every decade since the end of the ice age. And we are the heavy populated county in our area.

I am saying that we shouldn’t be okay with living in a country where people live in the middle of nowhere should have to do bake sales to make sure that their one fire truck remains up and running while John’s Creek can afford to pay their firefighters $80K a year and don’t have to do that

When we have state and federal government. Would you be okay with a volunteer police force?

Yes a bunch of poor people in a rural area trying to raise money from a bunch of other poor people doesn’t seem to be working out too well…

But in Johns Creek where I use to live where the median household income is $170k. Firefighters aren’t volunteering

https://www.indeed.com/cmp/City-of-Johns-Creek/salaries/Fire...

I am arguing that in the US as a nation, no firefighter should have to “volunteer” that’s where the state and federal government should step in.

I’m more okay with taking my tax dollars as a person who makes a good living to help rural areas and I would vote for a politician to help them before they would.

In Switzerland volunteer firefighting is common.

So is universal healthcare, free college education and a safety net.

Are firefighters in Switzerland doing bake sells to pay for maintenance on their equipment like the people in the cities in the article or does the government do it?

"universal healthcare" is funded by insurance.

No, they purchase their equipment funded by taxes.

Insurance isn’t tied to your job in Switzerland and firefighters aren’t doing bake sales for equipment. That’s my point.

Right?! I'm with you. And if rural America doesn't want socialism let them pay their far share for true fire protection costs and increased insurance premiums.

The equipment is already paid for with grants. Most people don't see a justifiable reason to have full-time services when the number of incidents is low.

The article said that they are having to do fundraisers for equipment maintenance. Eventually equipment needs to be replaced.

The very article said that even the software needs to be rewritten for new federal standards. Should that be free?

Rich how? What's the budget deficit again?

But yet we find money for the largest military in the world - and much of that goes to military equipment and bases that military leaders say they don’t need and for tax cuts.

How much money do you think it would take to fund the shortfall for every rural fire department?

Deficits are a policy choice, not an inevitability. The budget was balanced at the turn of the century but Republicans under G. W. Bush decided that meant they could cut taxes, especially for the rich. They did that again for both Trump terms, before COVID. Unlike the financial crisis or pandemic, there was no emergency driving those decisions and the massive debt increases were entirely voluntary.

For what it's worth, volunteer firefighters are very widespread in many -- most? -- European countries. It's not an artifact of cutthroat capitalism. In France, 83% of firefighters are volunteers. In Germany, 97%. They don't need to fundraise for equipment, though, the government pays for it, in true socialist fashion.

Yeah, 60% of the engines in the UK have what it calls "On-Call Firefighters". These aren't full timers, they usually have a "real" job but when their phone says they're needed they go fight fires. They're trained basically the same, but their main income is from that "real" job.

On the other hand, fire hazard continues to reduce, which means that to an ever greater extent the full time crews can deliver what's needed even in semi-rural communities like where I grew up. Their current plan is close the station nearest to me (which was "On-call" staffed) permanently.

> Yeah, 60% of the engines in the UK have what it calls "On-Call Firefighters". These aren't full timers, they usually have a "real" job but when their phone says they're needed they go fight fires.

My old physics teacher was one of them. Very chill guy, that was outside of the classroom a non-negligable amount of time (though often for different reasons), but still way one of the best teachers I had.

(It was always fun when he wrote "minimum" on the board. Everyone wrote in cursive, but his writing literally just made it look like lines going up and down)

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