As investments in Bay Area fire departments have grown in the wake of catastrophic fires around the region, several have opted to rely less on volunteer ranks that were once common. For some fire stations, volunteers have gone away entirely.

The decline in volunteers is part of a long trend across Bay Area fire departments, officials said. Factors include growing tax bases that allow for full-time positions, more intense training requirements, and a greater emphasis on building a pipeline for young, career-minded individuals who hope to eventually become full-fledged firefighters themselves.

Nationally, about seven in 10 fire personnel are volunteers, according to the National Fire Department Registry. These volunteers are largely confined to Midwest and East Coast states, Mokhtarian said, where fire risk poses a significantly lower threat and communities are not as flushed with tax dollars as in the Bay Area.

“Back in the day, Los Gatos had a volunteer fire district. They were in factories, they’d respond to calls, and then they would go back to work. But volunteers can’t replace full-time career firefighters,” Santa Clara County Fire Department Cpt. Matt Mokhtarian said. “In the Midwest or the East, it’s more rural and there’s less tax base. There’s not funding to support full-time firefighters at the staffing level that we have.”

But California is unique among U.S. states for having one of the highest proportions of career firefighters with 45.5% of fire personnel being professionals. In populous Bay Area counties, full-time firefighters make up about 90% of firefighting ranks.

Contra Costa County Fire Protection District exclusively uses career firefighters. The Santa Clara County Fire Department has 240 career firefighters with 10 volunteers who are fire-suppression certified, and another six who perform community outreach and share fire education.

The Alameda County Fire Department has one of the more sizable volunteer ranks with 31 reserves who can be tapped on to support its approximately 300 full-time firefighters during major incidents, public information officer Cheryl Hurd said.

“Our reserves are a part of our Firefighter Training and Education Program. It’s a mentorship program with primary goals to improve the quantity and quality of training for prospective professional Alameda County Firefighters,” Hurd told the Bay Area News Group.

These counties have the tax revenue to employ full-time firefighters with the single-minded responsibility to protect the public and mitigate fires, Mokhtarian said, while volunteers with aspirations of firefighting careers are trained to be the next generation as part of “feeder” programs — a break from the civilian volunteers of the past.

Participants are typically young adults who’ve recently graduated high school or are in college and are pursuing a volunteer program to gain experience with a local fire station. This opportunity affords them a chance to take part in firefighter training, meetings, and community outreach efforts to integrate them into the fire service.

When called upon — with California Fire Academy Class I certification — they can even assist in fighting wildfires.

“They worked the Complex fires in 2020,” Hurd said. “More recently, they worked long hours in the Corral Fire in San Joaquin County (in June 2024).”

An exception to the norm in the Bay Area is the San Mateo County Fire Department.

Nearly a third of its force is made up of volunteers, located in vast stretches of unincorporated communities. These seemingly anachronistic volunteer fire stations have continued because of their communities’ smaller tax bases, San Mateo County Fire Department Cpt. Gary Silva said.

“The tax base doesn’t warrant a full-time fire district in those areas,” Silva said. “Loma Mar, Kings Canyon and La Honda (volunteer districts) are so rural, so they have continued using volunteers.”

The rural communities in San Mateo County have insulated volunteer districts from the broader professional evolution of fire forces around the Bay Area.

San Bruno Fire Chief Ari Delay is a 34-year veteran firefighter who started his career as a volunteer for La Honda Volunteer Fire Brigade and is now its chief as a full-time career firefighter with the San Mateo County Fire Department.

The growing responsibilities of firefighters — which include medical emergencies and accidents — have come with greater requirements for volunteers, making it more difficult to attract and retain them, he said.

“If you’re doing business correctly, the training requirements are a mirror regardless if you’re a volunteer or a full-time firefighter,” Delay said. “You’re fulfilling those training requirements after hours during the week and on the weekends. That’s 400-500 hours just to meet your minimum requirements.”

The amount of service calls received by the La Honda Volunteer Fire Brigade is far below the amount received by more populated fire districts. But the brigade’s volunteers have an edge when responding to local incidents, Delay said. He said he often responds to service calls in his own backyard, helping neighbors that he knows personally and protecting the forest he’s walked before.

“The real advantage of that sometimes is the locals have a unique understanding of the geography and the layout of a community. It’s rare to see a career firefighter have that,” Delay said. “This job is what you make it, whether you get paid for it or not.”

Volunteer firefighters for the Boulder Creek Fire District are joined by reinforcements from other California fire departments to battle the CZU August Lightning Complex fire on Aug. 20, 2020, in Boulder Creek, Calif. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)