They’re all staffed by volunteers.

Sadly enough in today’s day and age, volunteer fire departments are disappearing in community after community all over America. What once was virtually every town’s pride and joy is being replaced, slowly but surely, with paid professional career firefighters.

The change was documented by USA TODAY in a cover story earlier this month. If you didn’t see it, we’re excerpting it below for you. It’s bylined by staff writer Rick Hampson. Here’s his story:

It took 26 fire companies from three counties last year to fight the fire at Dino’s Grille, a two-story wood structure that ignited on a hot Tuesday morning in Penn Township, just outside Harrisburg. The local volunteer chief still fumes just thinking about it.

When Monte Supko arrived at the scene, he signaled other volunteer departments in the area for help. He needed firefighters, but what he got, mostly, was firetrucks—many with only one or two people aboard.

By the time sufficient help was assembled, Dino’s was a smoking wreck. “A parade of $500,000 firetrucks didn’t help much,” he says. “I got mad, because we’ve waited so long to address the problem.”

The problem is this: the volunteer fire company, an institution that dates to Ben Franklin, is slowly going the way of the horse-drawn pumper.

Blame it on the changes in society: longer commutes, two-income households, year-round youth sports, chain stores that won’t release workers at midday to jump on a firetruck.

Blame it on new folks in town who don’t even know the department is volunteer. Blame it on stricter training requirements and the lure of paying fire jobs in the cities.

There is no greater, longer-running expression of volunteerism in U.S. history than the volunteer fire service, which still saves taxpayers billions of dollars each year. Almost three-fourths of the nation’s 1.1 million firefighters are volunteers and two-thirds of all fire departments are volunteer.

But even though emergency calls are up, the number of volunteer firefighters has dropped dramatically; more than 10% over the past two decades.

The kinds of volunteers who used to be able to cover weekday calls—farmers, shop owners, factory shift workers—are becoming as rare as a firehouse Dalmatian.

Supko remembers when his fire company got a new member a month; there wasn’t enough room on its firetrucks for everyone. Now, he says, “nobody wants to join.”

Consider training. Once, a novice received his basic instruction from his colleagues and learned the rest on the job. Today, most departments require more than 100 hours of initial instruction plus weekly drills and annual refresher courses for everything from first aid to anti-terrorism.

Firefighting isn’t what it used to be. Fire calls increasingly consist of what firefighters disdainfully call “smells and bells.”

Smells (somebody smells smoke and calls 911 without checking to see if there’s a fire) and bells (false house alarms) “are basically a waste of time,” says Vincent McNally, a veteran Philadelphia volunteer fire officer.

The “Firefighters Needed” signs outside thousands of firehouses have not solved the recruiting crisis. The only thing that seems to work is one that makes a department volunteer in name only: pay.

A growing number of “volunteer” departments rely on government funds to pay for a few fulltime firefighters, to pay volunteers per call or per hour; or to pay for volunteers’ health insurance or pensions.

“People have to realize that volunteerism isn’t free any more,” says Al Musicant, New Jersey director of the National Volunteer Fire Council (NVFC). “You’re going to have to give volunteers a stipend.” That will be expensive; the NVFC says volunteers provide about $37 billion a year in free fire services.

Even limited compensation bodes ill for the future of volunteerism. Once a department starts paying, it’s on a slippery slope.

The “combination” department—an increasingly popular hybrid with volunteers and full-timers—is often just a stage on the route to a force of full-time, career firefighters.

The demographics promise to get worse. In many places, volunteer firefighting is a tradition passed down through families and friends. Fewer volunteers today means even fewer tomorrow.

“To be honest with you,” says Robbie Honeycutt, chief of a small volunteer fire department outside Charlotte, “the volunteer fire service is a dyin’ breed.”

McNally agrees. “It was the blue-collar country club,” he sighs. “You could shoot a little pool and have a beer. It’s a relic of a simpler time. But society has changed. The world has changed.”

We continue today with Part II:

“People in the wildfire education business often joke about the need for a really big fire to get folks’ attention.

“Yes, fear does work wonders, but in the end it only produces short-term behaviors. For a few days or weeks, people will hear the word and be inspired to prune their trees and cut down some brush. In their efforts to do something, anything, they will engage in frenetic activity that helps them deal with their fear of fire.

“In the process they may end up removing too much or the wrong things, even sacrificing that treasured juniper next to the house out of sheer desperation. Months later, their reasons for doing these things will be largely forgotten. And the stump sprouts and weeds will reappear and the forest will grow thicker until the next fire comes and the cycle is repeated.

“This is not the kind of message we need. Not that a little healthy respect for fire is unwarranted.

“Like water, weather, and natural critters, fire is an ever-present part of our environment. It needs to be understood and prepared for, not feared. Unfortunately, a century of too rigid fire suppression and the promotion of the idea that all fires are bad will not be easily erased from the public consciousness.

“Smokey the Bear has succeeded only too well.

“Though we might wish to eventually restore wildlands to their historic fire-return intervals so that less damaging surface fires can safely pass through our communities, changing people’s comfort levels to accept fire as a next door neighbor will most likely take generations to accomplish.

“I think a large part of the problem comes from how we view ourselves in relation to the wildlands we live in. We need to look back on the very reasons that first led us to build our houses here. And we must understand the consequences of our doing so.

“As a defensible space educator, I like to point out that despite public fears of the big fire coming into town from public land, more fires spread from residential and other developed areas to the wildlands than vice-versa.

“This implies a major responsibility not only to our families and properties but to the land itself that we as privileged homeowners in this area all share. Recognizing this is the first step toward a more mature relationship to these wildlands.

TO BE CONCLUDED TOMORROW