The Barn Full of Trucks
The arithmetic he found has only tightened since.
Volunteers make up two out of three American firefighters, and across the rural interior their ranks are aging and emptying faster than anyone is replacing them.
When the whistle sounds in a Kansas county of a few thousand people spread across several hundred square miles, the equipment is ready. The pumper sits in a steel building at the edge of town, fueled and inspected, its hoses coiled and its tank full. What has grown scarce is the supply of people willing and able to climb into the cab. Reporting from Cedar Vale for Harvest Public Media, Frank Morris described a fire barn crowded with old trucks and short of anyone to run them. That was nearly a decade ago. The arithmetic he found has only tightened since.
Roughly two out of three firefighters in the United States are volunteers, according to the National Fire Protection Association. They cover most of the country’s land area, the long runs of two-lane highway and dryland wheat and pasture where no paid crew waits at a downtown station. In 2020 the association counted about 676,900 volunteers, the lowest figure since it began keeping the tally in 1984 and the most recent national count it has published, down from roughly 897,750 in that first year. Over the same span the national population grew by about forty percent. Fewer people now answer more calls across a larger country.
The loss falls unevenly. The association’s own analysis put the steepest declines in the smallest places. Of a drop of about 132,000 volunteers between 2015 and 2017, more than 83,000 came from departments protecting towns of 2,500 residents or fewer. These are the communities with no fallback, where the local volunteers are often the only emergency response, fire or medical, for many miles in any direction. When their ranks thin, nothing waits behind them to fill the gap.
The reason the volunteers give is economic, and it holds across the prairie. A century ago a small farm town carried enough shops, mills, and trades to keep working-age adults nearby during the day, close enough to set down a task and run to a fire. That local economy has thinned to almost nothing. Dwight Call, who keeps a mechanic’s shop in Cedar Vale, told Morris the town once had the businesses to staff a full department and no longer does, because anyone of working age either commutes out or works one of the few jobs in town that will not release a person mid-shift for a grass fire. The willingness is still there. What has vanished is the kind of work that used to let a neighbor answer the whistle on a weekday afternoon.
What remains is an aging roster. The National Volunteer Fire Council estimates that about a third of volunteers in the smallest communities are now over fifty, roughly double the share of the 1980s. In western Kansas one department came to depend on Montra Beeler, then sixty-two, who Morris reported stood barely five feet and had trouble seeing over the hood of the older trucks, and who turned out to wrecks and fires alongside her son because the two of them and one other man were the ones who reliably came. The people holding these departments together joined decades ago, and the generation that would replace them is not arriving in the numbers the work demands.
The work has expanded while the workforce contracted. Jeff Mortimer of the Mayfield, Kansas department recalled that when he started, the job was fires. By the time he spoke to Morris it took in downed power lines, vehicle extrication, hazardous materials, and technical rescue, each carrying its own training hours for people paid for none of it. Most rural calls now are medical rather than fire. Chrissy Bartell’s volunteer ambulance service in Norwich, Kansas covers three hundred square miles and runs close to double the call volume of a decade earlier, with a crew older than it used to be.
The result is a response system that increasingly does not respond. Indiana Public Media reported that a department covering the town of Nashville and surrounding Washington Township, across 102 square miles, missed 410 of the 994 calls it received in 2025, about forty-two percent, because its volunteers hold full-time jobs outside the county and many live a twenty-five-minute drive from the station. Its chief laid out the underlying physics: a structure fire roughly doubles in size every thirty to sixty seconds, and in the lightweight materials of modern construction the window before total loss is short. Twenty minutes to reach the station before a truck rolls, she told the outlet, often means one or two people arriving at a house already gone. In Buchanan County, Missouri, a chief named Johnson described the same trap from the inside: a roster of twenty counts for little when work schedules leave only three or four people available at any given hour.
The official remedy for a department that cannot field a crew is mutual aid, the neighboring company dispatched to cover the gap. The neighbors are short too. When the Brown County crew cannot turn out, the call forwards to departments in the northern part of the county that face the same shortage, which is part of why their own call volume keeps rising. A backup system was never built to be the primary one, and it buckles when every department in a region runs thin at the same hour.
The obvious alternative, paid firefighters, collides with the budgets of the places that need them most. By common industry estimates a single career firefighter costs a municipality somewhere between seventy thousand and a hundred twenty thousand dollars a year in salary, benefits, and overhead. Staffing one engine around the clock takes at least four of them to cover shifts, leave, and training, which puts the yearly personnel cost of a single staffed truck between roughly 280,000 and 480,000 dollars. A town running its whole government on a few million dollars cannot absorb that for one apparatus, let alone a full department. The National Volunteer Fire Council has estimated that the donated hours of volunteers save local governments on the order of 46.9 billion dollars a year. That number is also the size of the bill coming due as the volunteers disappear.
So the departments close. At the end of 2025 the South Meriden Volunteer Fire Department in Connecticut, known as Engine Company 6, disbanded after 117 years, its membership having fallen from about forty in its heyday to too few to keep running. The state’s comptroller, Sean Scanlon, found that Connecticut lost sixty-four percent of its volunteer force between 2017 and 2025. Months earlier the Torringford Volunteer Fire Department gave up its services after sixty-eight years, following two nearby companies that had already shut their doors. In Beaver County, Pennsylvania, Matt Straub, the volunteer chief at Big Beaver Borough, told a television reporter his department would stop running calls in 2026 unless the borough found the money to pay staff, since the waiting list of eager members that once existed is gone and the few who remain stay out of obligation. Each closure hands its territory to neighbors who are already stretched.
The siren still works in a few thousand small towns across the interior. Trucks sit fueled in the barns. What hangs over each one is the oldest question a community can ask of itself, which is who will come when the call goes out and the people who used to come are too old or too few or already gone. For a hundred years the answer on the prairie was a neighbor who heard the whistle and left whatever was in hand. That neighbor is aging now, the work that once kept such people in town has moved away, and no one has yet decided who pays for the answer when the volunteers are no longer there to give it for free.