A volunteer fire department (VFD) is a fire department composed of volunteers who perform fire suppression and other related emergency services for a local jurisdiction.
The first large organized force of firefighters was the Corps of Vigiles, established in ancient Rome in 6 AD.
The term "volunteer" contrasts with career firefighters who are fully compensated for their services. Some volunteer firefighters may be part of a combination fire department that utilizes both full-time and volunteer firefighters. In this way, a station can be regularly staffed for rapid response with apparatus, and the volunteers provide supplementary staffing and staffed apparatus before, during, and after an incident, or while the full-time career staff are out of service doing training.
The term "volunteer" may also be used in reference to a group of part-time or on-call firefighters who may have other occupations when not engaged in occasional firefighting. Although they may have "volunteered" to become members, and to respond to the call for help, they are compensated as employees during the time they are responding to or attending an emergency scene, and possibly for training. An on-call firefighter may also volunteer time for other non-emergency duties as well (training, fundraising, equipment maintenance, etc.).
Read more about Volunteer Fire Department: Financial Support, Expanded Duties, Emergency Response, Training
Famous quotes containing the words volunteer, fire and/or department:
“We should have an army so organized and so officered as to be capable in time of emergency, in cooperation with the National Militia, and under the provision of a proper national volunteer law, rapidly to expand into a force sufficient to resist all probable invasion from abroad and to furnish a respectable expeditionary force if necessary in the maintenance of our traditional American policy which bears the name of President Monroe.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
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And pity to the general wrong of Rome—
As fire drives out fire, so pity pity—
Hath done this deed on Caesar.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.”
—Tennessee Williams (1914–1983)