Across vast stretches of the country, the first responders to a fire are all volunteers. But the number of calls for help has tripled in recent decades, even as the National Volunteer Fire Council reports that the ranks of volunteers look decidedly thinner. Then came the pandemic. When an enormous wildfire raced toward his hometown on the high plains of Paradise, Kansas, last December, volunteer fire chief Quentin Maupin put down his farm work and sprang to action. He took the department’s 18,000-pound pumper truck out alone. “Normally, our policy is you need two people on a truck, so if you have trouble, the other person can help out here or there,” Maupin said. “But that day, there wasn’t anybody here. And I knew we just gotta get a truck out there right now.” That initiative nearly cost Maupin his life when a wall of flames twice the height of telephone poles suddenly engulfed the truck, destroyed its brake lines and melted its flashing lights. Maupin escaped to check on his family in the path of the blaze and went back to work fighting the fire.
Source: KCUR News