Three years ago, a fiery derailment of a freight train carrying hazardous materials upended life in the quiet rural town of East Palestine.
The fallout was apocalyptic: A plume of smoke and fire billowed from dozens of derailed cars. The vinyl chloride they released into the frigid February air hung heavy over the homes of the town’s 5,000 residents, about half of whom would be swiftly evacuated.
The first responder to roll up on the scene wasn’t a chemist, or a police officer or an engineer.
It was a volunteer firefighter who had no idea what he was walking into.
In a National Transportation Safety Board hearing four months later, local Fire Chief Keith Drabick said it was a miracle no one was hurt.
“For that miracle, I am grateful to my East Palestine Fire Department members, all of whom are volunteers,” Drabick told members of the federal agency.
In the following days, the volunteers worked with a slew of local, state and federal agencies to clear debris, perform a controlled burn of toxic chemicals and usher residents to safety.
There was more Drabick wanted to do to initially respond to the crisis, but he said it wasn’t possible.
“Small departments like ours and most volunteer departments in this country ... don't have the ability to send people to chase a train,” he said.
The East Palestine disaster is an extreme example of what volunteer firefighters are being asked to do all the time. The firefighters and emergency medical services responders who staff a majority of Ohio departments are recovering bodies, responding to fatal car crashes and running into burning buildings, for little to no pay, armed with as few as 36 hours of training.
Even before the East Palestine disaster, a state task force had sounded the alarm about fatalities, inadequate training and a recruitment crisis for volunteers that staff 70% of Ohio’s 1,180 fire departments.
“Unfortunately, these volunteer services are seeing changing times. Many of these volunteer service departments are in jeopardy,” Gov. Mike DeWine said at a 2022 press conference announcing the formation of the state task force. “We need to look at these challenges and come up with fresh solutions.”
But addressing those problems may prove challenging: Ohio’s modern volunteer firefighter system has centuries-old roots that are difficult to untangle.
Bucket brigades and fist fights: The history of volunteer firefighting
Community bucket brigades in early colonial times inspired some of the first American volunteer departments in the 1700s. Unaffiliated with local governments, these fire societies were small, self-financed and self-governed.
As time went on, fire departments never became as uniformly organized as law enforcement, leading to a scrappy free-for-all in growing urban areas.
“When volunteer fire departments were formed, in order to raise money for equipment, they relied on fire insurance companies,” said Kenny Rybka, a former volunteer firefighter who now works with the Western Reserve Fire Museum in Cleveland. “And if there was a fire and the volunteer fire company showed up, if you had a fire mark on your building, they would go to work to fight your fire.
“But if you didn't, they would do nothing.”
It got to the point where different volunteer departments would scuffle over the right to fight a fire and collect the insurance paycheck after.
“So there would actually be fistfights in the street in front of the fire building,” Rybka said. “They would take axes and cut the other fire company's hoses. And it was a mess.”
The 1895 book “History of the Cincinnati Fire Department” describes a particularly brutal brawl four decades prior:
“The battle took place during a fire on the corner of Augusta and John streets, between Western Hose Company No. 3, and the Washington Company No. 1. On that occasion ten companies were drawn into the fight, while the building, a planing mill, was permitted to burn to the ground. Mayor [Mark P.] Taylor appeared on the scene and read the riot act, but to no purpose, the battle continuing until daylight.”
Two years later, in 1853, Cincinnati established the first professional and fully paid public fire department in the country.
“So they decided to start paying the firefighters,” Rybka said. “They start paying for the equipment. … They took the current volunteer fire departments that were in existence and absorbed them into the city.”
Many others in Ohio — and in the nation — followed.
But not all were able to do that. Staffing a full-time department is expensive, especially in rural areas with smaller tax bases. Even to this day, nearly three-quarters of departments in Ohio are made up of volunteers.
The consequences
It’s a system so flawed the highest ranking firefighter in the state said it puts the lives of volunteers and residents at risk.
“The threats, the fire risks, the fire hazards, they've all increased,” said Ohio State Fire Marshal Kevin Reardon. “Line-of-duty deaths, they've all increased.”
The work can be incredibly dangerous — even more so than professional firefighting: Ideastream Public Media’s data analysis found that between 1990 and 2025, 57% of Ohio firefighter fatalities were volunteers. That’s 10 percentage points higher than the national average of that same period.
They died on scene at fires, responding to the emergencies, on duty and in other ways. Almost half died of overexertion.
Residents are suffering too. Ideastream’s analysis found that response times for volunteer fire departments are more than two minutes longer than full-time departments – two minutes that can make a huge difference mid-blaze.
The volunteer departments are often in sparsely populated rural areas where longer drives are a given. Even so, Reardon said the volunteer model just doesn’t cut it.
“Getting a call on a pager or your phone or whatever, and then getting in your car, driving to the station, and then taking a run,” Reardon said. “They're not gonna make any saves with it with a 10-minute response time. You're not gonna save anything or anybody. You're not even gonna save the mailbox.”
And a crisis is looming. As volunteers age, with the average volunteer firefighter at 54, volunteer departments are struggling to replace those who retire. Service calls were up 23% for departments who classify themselves as volunteer from 2020 to 2024, according to an Ideastream analysis of data from the Ohio Department of Commerce.
Meanwhile, fewer people are getting certified as volunteer firefighters. The number of active volunteer firefighter certifications has decreased nearly 15% since January of 2020, according to an Ideastream analysis of data from Ohio Emergency Medical Services.
“Some people would say they do firefighting as a hobby. That is completely wrong. Anyone that says that to me is going to have an argument,” Reardon said. “They do it to serve their community.”
All week, we’ll look at the challenges the volunteers face as they seek to do that, the support they lack to do it safely and possible solutions for the future of volunteer firefighting. Tomorrow, we’ll learn about the funding challenges small volunteer departments face.
Abigail Bottar and Kendall Crawford contributed reporting to this story.