In the back of the ambulance, Peg Dugan could feel her husband’s pulse fading under her fingers. She called out his blood pressure levels — not to the crew she usually ran calls with as a volunteer firefighter, but to her nine-year-old grandson Owen, whose shoes she hurriedly helped put on as she explained they had to save PapPap.
Moments earlier, her husband Doug, PapPap to Owen, had run out the door — a long-worn reflex of the Tiltonsville Volunteer Fire Department chief — to respond to a boat fire. Before he could make it to the fire, he suffered a pulmonary embolism.
Doug was the man she fought fires with, the man she married nearly 13 years prior in a dress a shade darker than the town’s white fire truck. They lived across the street from the station, the opening and closing bay doors providing the soundtrack of their shared lives.
But amid the wailing sirens on this day, she sensed that their life together was coming to an end.
“I look back at him, like, ‘Oh, he's leaving us. He's leaving us,’” Peg said.
Doug Dugan died on June 16, 2021 after nearly half a century of service.
More than half of the Ohio firefighters who have died on duty since 1990 were volunteers, like Doug, who sacrificed their life with no expectation of a paycheck.
Across Ohio, volunteer fire departments are shrinking and aging. The number of active volunteer firefighter certifications in Ohio has decreased by nearly 15% since January of 2020. At the same time, call volumes have risen by 23% in Ohio fire departments that classify themselves as volunteer. The complexity of the demand on volunteer firefighters — medical runs, hazmat training, technical rescue — has grown alongside it.
A 2023 report from the Ohio Task Force on Volunteer Fire Service warned of the risks of relying on unpaid, overstretched workers to respond to Ohioans’ darkest days. But implementation of many of its recommendations has lagged, leaving thousands reliant on a system built on sacrifice. Sacrifice that people like the Dugans make not for money, but out of a sense of pride and duty to their communities.
“Some people would say they do firefighting as a hobby,” said Ohio Fire Marshal Kevin Reardon. “That is completely wrong. They're willing to put down their life for somebody else's.”
Changing communities
But the culture that has sustained that calling is under threat. Tom Franks, chief of the fire department in Gorham Township in Northwest Ohio, which includes the village of Fayette, has watched it unravel over his 45-year tenure.
He never planned on becoming a firefighter. But when he was 18, he performed CPR on his father, who had suffered a heart attack. The volunteer firefighters who rushed in to help couldn’t save his dad, but their work changed the course of his life. What he witnessed inspired him to join their ranks.
“I've been that person that God put on the earth to do this,” he said.
For decades, that’s how departments stayed alive: neighbor-to-neighbor responsibility.
Volunteer firefighting was something to aspire to. Farmers ran out from their fields to tackle a fire. The roster was full. In some towns, there was even a waiting list to join the ranks. In Fayette, Franks and many other recruits lived so close to the firehouse that they could be in the tanker before the fire whistle stopped blowing.
But over time, the makeup of communities like Fayette has changed. The factory that built vehicle emergency brakes shuttered. Years later, so did the business that made automotive air conditioners in the village of around 1,000 residents. Without those jobs, some residents left.
Now, more than ever, the rural community on U.S. Route 20 feels like a passing through point. The same volunteers who once answered calls in the middle of dinner for the fire department have moved with the jobs, farther outside of village limits.
“They knew every inch of their communities. We'll never be able to replace that. Never,” Reardon said.
Now when a fire call comes in during the workday, only retirees like Franks are able to respond quick enough. They rely on mutual aid — from other small departments nearby, who face the same recruitment issues — to cover their 72 square miles of service area.
Last year, their department went on more than 400 calls. Each time they're out, Franks worries that another call for help will come in.
“Our station might be empty unless I stay back here,” he said.
The generational break
The pride that once pulled volunteers into service still exists in families like the Dugans, who passed down an innate sense of civic duty to their children, just as they would freckles or flat feet. But it can no longer be counted on to carry through the generations.
Even those raised inside the firehouse aren’t necessarily picking up the mantle. Daniel Knapke went to college for economics and looked for housing in a volunteer fire district — all with the intention of following in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps and becoming a volunteer firefighter. He volunteered with Williamsburg Township Fire Department, just as his father did, for more than a decade.
But competing with volunteer departments are those offering career firefighting positions. And those opportunities abound. The Cincinnati Fire Department offers positions with up to six-figure salaries. The Columbus Division of Fire has a recruitment office. Beyond pay and benefits, they offer stability and incentives that small volunteer departments can’t match.
Knapke wasn’t happy in his office job. Firefighting is his true passion. It didn’t take long for him to realize that, with the sheer amount of full-time firefighting jobs available, he could make a career out of it.
Although he valued volunteer work, he asked himself a question more and more young recruits are coming to: “Why would I do something for free that other people are getting paid to do?”
And so he works now as a career firefighter with the Miami Township Fire Department in Southwest Ohio.
Small volunteer departments have become stepping stones, places where young recruits learn the ropes before moving on to a regular paycheck as a professional firefighter.
It’s not just about money. Knapke knows the cost of giving it everything. His father, David, answered a mutual aid fire call in Mount Orab when his heart gave out and he died. Knapke said it wasn’t just the stress of that one call, but the thousands that had come before it.
Daniel Knapke hesitates to imagine that same fate for his family. Or how workers’ compensation could possibly keep them all afloat if he were injured volunteering. He has considered volunteer firefighting in addition to doing it professionally, but he fears it would leave too little time for his kids.
“The fire service can't be my whole life,” he said. “It's not fair to my family.”
The toll
Knapke’s calculation isn’t the exception. And with fewer recruits willing to shoulder the burden, veteran volunteers are forced to keep donning their protective gear, even as the wrinkles on their face begin to resemble the creases of their coats.
In Ohio, the average age of volunteer firefighters is 54, according to the State Fire Marshal taskforce report. But many stay at it decades longer, far past retirement age.
At 66, John Finley, the fire chief of Malta & McConnelsville in Southeast Ohio, has no intention of slowing down. He never hesitates to take a call — not even after a run where a roof collapsed on his head.
“I went back in the very next fire run,” he said, rubbing the scar on the back of his neck.
Still, he’s the first to admit it takes a toll. Each year, he risks more scars from car wrecks, river rescues and the toll responding to them takes. An analysis of Ohio workers’ compensation claims between 2001 and 2017 showed that nearly a third of all firefighter injuries resulted from overexertion, according to research published in the Journal of Safety Research.
It can be a deadly problem. Overall, firefighter line-of-duty deaths are down, but there’s still a stark difference between the number of paid and volunteer firefighter deaths.
Fatality data that used to be available on the U.S. Fire Administration's website was no longer available as of December 2025. The U.S. Fire Administration did not respond to a request for comment on why the data was taken down. In a statement, a spokesperson said that 2023 and 2024 annual fatality reports will be posted in the first quarter of 2026. Detailed data with volunteer status currently available on the website only goes through December 2021. We have published the data as of May 2025 here.
Between 1990 and 2025, 57% of Ohio firefighter line-of-duty deaths were volunteers, according to a data analysis by Ideastream Public Media. That’s higher than the national average.
They died on scene at fires and other emergencies, while on duty and off duty. More than half of volunteer firefighter line-of-duty deaths across the country were from overexertion, according to the U.S. Fire Administration, 69% of those who died in the line-of-duty were 41 and older, like Dugan was.
Nearly all of the workers tracking and investigating firefighter deaths on the federal level were laid off by the Trump administration during its massive cutting of the federal government in spring of 2025, ProPublica reported. The layoffs included employees in the Firefighter Fatality and Prevention Program under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which was often called to identify causes and make recommendations to avoid similar accidents in the future.
The CDC did not respond to a request for comment.
Nationally, Ohio ranks sixth for volunteer firefighter line-of-duty deaths.
Emotional cost
The toll of volunteer firefighting isn’t just measured in injuries or lives lost. Those who remain pay a price, too. Finley’s family has paid it in canceled date nights and missed Christmas pageants.
“I've missed Thanksgiving dinners and Christmas dinners and time with my kids and everything else for my fire department. But today you don't quite have as much dedication like that as you used to,” he said.
Instead of holiday parties, Finley has witnessed his community’s worst days. It adds up.
Firefighters face higher rates of suicidal ideation than the average population. Bill Gase, chief of Washington Township in Northwest Ohio, said his small department lost a member to suicide in recent years. The department uses part of its limited funds to bring in counselors to ease the trauma of being the town’s last line of defense.
Ohio firefighters keep volunteering even when their own health declines. Gase said one of his volunteers stayed on for 72 years — only turning in his turnout gear right before his 90th birthday. Occasionally, he still offers to drive the truck.
For many, it feels impossible to walk away when no one is coming up behind them.
“If we don't do it, who's going to do it?” Tom Franks of Fayette Village said. “We all put on the tough guy act, and we go out, and we do our jobs. But there's times we go home and we bawl too.”
Why they keep going
Sometimes, when Franks closes his eyes, he sees the faces of the people his community has lost, like the two teenagers who died in a fire in 2024.
It helps, he said, when he’s out shopping for groceries or visiting schools, to see the people he saved. Like the crying toddler he rescued from a wreck on one of his first runs. At the age of 18, he was the only firefighter skinny enough to crawl in and save the child. Now an adult, the man he rescued still remembers that day.
“He can still remember me crawling through, my face, coming in to get him out of the car because I was not going to leave that child,” he said.
Those moments help keep people like Franks, Finley and so many other volunteer firefighters going in a system that asks for a lot more than it gives back.
They have long accepted that there is no pension. There is no paid leave when they walk out of their full-time jobs to answer a call. No tax credit to make up for the dinners missed and holidays interrupted. The Ohio Task Force on Volunteer Fire Service presented these ideas three years ago. None of them have been enacted.
What remains is the expectation that someone will respond when the tones drop, even as fewer people are willing or able to do it.
Peg Dugan still feels the pull. Since Doug’s death in 2021, she’s lost more than a husband and a fire chief: She no longer feels the community she once felt on every run. She doesn't know the name of everyone on the squad. Doug isn’t there to give her comfort.
She was diagnosed with breast cancer two years ago. She’s cut back on the number of calls she responds to. But when the pager goes off and she hears the bay doors on the station house across the street open, she sometimes can’t help but look toward her front door.
“God created me pretty tough,” she said. “So I always try to just muddle on through and try to do what I can.”
Tomorrow, we'll learn about the solutions that volunteer fire departments are working toward to survive.
Abigail Bottar contributed reporting to this story.
