# Why do firemen sleep on the job? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 10, 2008, 5:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-firemen-sleep-on-the-job/440847 "2008-03-10T17:09:59Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![guizot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guizot/32/3636_2.png) [@guizot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/guizot)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2008, 1:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-firemen-sleep-on-the-job/440847/21 "2008-03-11T13:20:55Z")
[QUOTE=don’t ask] The volunteers receive no pay. They are usually part of the [http://www.bushfire.nsw.gov.au/](http://www.bushfire.nsw.gov.au/)[Rural Fire Service](http://www.bushfire.nsw.gov.au/). Notoriously amongst career firemen these guys are considered to be pyromaniacs. Unfortunately history proves this slander to be true in many cases. [/QUOTE] Aren’t they also just people who live in remote, small towns where they can’t afford to have someone paid and on duty 24 hours a day? If there is a structural fire in town, a certain group of people have trained to be able to put it out. For a forest fire or a brush fire, the Forest Service handles it. In California, the pyromaniacs typically start a brushfire in the hills, and then go away, come back, join in the firefighting in order to be a “hero.” ---
**Author:** ![TheLoadedDog](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/35a633/32.png) [@TheLoadedDog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TheLoadedDog)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2008, 1:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-firemen-sleep-on-the-job/440847/22 "2008-03-11T13:56:34Z")
[QUOTE=guizot] Aren’t they also just people who live in remote, small towns where they can’t afford to have someone paid and on duty 24 hours a day? If there is a structural fire in town, a certain group of people have trained to be able to put it out. For a forest fire or a brush fire, the Forest Service handles it. In California, the pyromaniacs typically start a brushfire in the hills, and then go away, come back, join in the firefighting in order to be a “hero.” [/QUOTE] Sort of. Bear in mind that we don’t have “city” or “county” positions in the Australian emergency services (fire/police/ambulance). The official “New South Wales [or other state] Fire Brigade” are the guys that come out in their shiny red truck when your house is on fire, be it in a city metropolitan area or a large town. They are paid professionals employed by the state. Then there is the “Volunteer Rural Bush Fire Service”. These guys just do bush fires (forest fires), and could care less if your house is burning down and the NSWFB are attending. I assume they’d help out in building fired in remote areas, though. ---
**Author:** ![Shagnasty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9dc877/32.png) [@Shagnasty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shagnasty)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2008, 2:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-firemen-sleep-on-the-job/440847/23 "2008-03-11T14:13:27Z")
Volunteer firefighters are very common in the U.S. as well. I would guess that they are in the vast majority of firefighters nationwide. They aren’t just found in remote areas either. My town in suburban Boston has one paid fire chief and the rest are volunteers. Volunteer firefighters are essential in rural areas. You never can tell when a giant blaze is going to break out and needs a fast response from lots of firefighters. They reason they do it is basically the same reason that little kids tend to like toy fire trucks. Many people just love the idea of firefighting and that is a way to do it for real. It often costs the volunteers money to do it as well. They often buy their own equipment and pay for some of their own training. In a lot of places, the volunteer fire department doubles as a social club. ---
**Author:** ![Bridget\_Burke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7cd45c/32.png) [@Bridget\_Burke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bridget_Burke)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2008, 2:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-firemen-sleep-on-the-job/440847/24 "2008-03-11T14:29:27Z")
[QUOTE=don’t ask] The volunteers receive no pay. They are usually part of the [http://www.bushfire.nsw.gov.au/](http://www.bushfire.nsw.gov.au/)[Rural Fire Service](http://www.bushfire.nsw.gov.au/). Notoriously amongst career firemen these guys are considered to be pyromaniacs. Unfortunately history proves this slander to be true in many cases. [/QUOTE] I remember attending fund-raising barbecues for the Volunteer Firemen in my little home town. What do you know–[they became famous](http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,905579,00.html?iid=chix-sphere) in 1971–just after I left. > [@](#): > > In the firehouses of Norman Rockwell’s bucolic America, firemen passed the hours between alarms playing checkers and showing off the polished brass and bright red trucks to wide-eyed young visitors. But for the volunteer firemen of Genoa, Texas, in suburban Houston, that was not enough. In the past three years, eight bored Genoa firemen have set about 40 fires in abandoned buildings and grass fields. As soon as the blazes were going, the arsonists would dash back to the firehouse and rush off to put out their own fires. It wasn’t really a Norman Rockwell town–more like a wide spot in the Old Galveston Road. But we’ve got lots of volunteer firefighters in the USA, who mostly do good work; they handle medical & other emergencies, as well as fires. “Firefighter” is now preferred because many of them are women. ---
**Author:** ![iamthewalrus\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/258eb7/32.png) [@iamthewalrus\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamthewalrus_3)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2008, 9:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-firemen-sleep-on-the-job/440847/25 "2008-03-11T21:05:54Z")
[QUOTE=t-bonham@scc.net] Is that true? Where did you hear it? I understood a lot of fires are caused by smokers falling asleep, and their cigarette starting the couch/chair/bed on fire. I would think that is more likely to happen at night. [/QUOTE] I don’t have a cite; I was just trying to think of the likely causes of fires, and most of them are either independent of people being awake (some electrical fires, for example) or are much more likely to happen while people are awake. I didn’t think of falling asleep smoking. ---
**Author:** ![danceswithcats](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/9e8a1a/32.png) [@danceswithcats](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/danceswithcats)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2008, 4:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-firemen-sleep-on-the-job/440847/26 "2008-03-12T04:40:18Z")
Volly v career or combination: According to the NFPA, approximately 800,000 volunteer firefighters nationwide protect the majority of the country’s geographical area. Of all the fire departments in the United States, an estimated 73% are all volunteer. In PA, of 2,448 fire companies, 2,354 (96.1%) are all volunteer, 72 (3%) are combination, and 22 (.9%) are all career. Source: PA Legislative Budget and Finance Committee Report 6/05. As far as fires taking place at night, consider a few things. Most people who are employed outside the home work day shift. So, they usually go home after the work day is done, which means they are home at night. When they are home, they do lots of things which result in house fires, such as: Smoking Lighting candles Cooking Use space heaters Light wood fires Use household heaters Use clothes dryers > [@](#): > > 94% of civilian structure fire deaths resulted from fires in the home. > > The peak period for home structure fires during 1999 and the five-year period from 1994 through 1998 was between 6:00 and 7:00 p.m., which is likely correlated with household members arriving home, turning up the heat, and cooking the evening meal. (Cooking and heating are the leading causes of home > structure fires.) Home fire deaths, however, peak between in the early morning hours when most people are asleep – between 4:00 and 5:00 a.m. in 1999, and between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. in the 1994-1998 time period. Although these are among the lowestfrequency periods for home fires, fires that do start can develop undetected, such as the leading fatal fire scenario – a smoldering cigarette discarded on upholstered furniture, a mattress, or bedding. Almost half (44-46%) of the fatal fire injuries were caused by fires reported between 11:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m., although only 19-20% of the fires were reported during this time. Source: NFPA report ‘The US Fire Problem’ 6/03 ---
**Author:** ![drachillix](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/48db29/32.png) [@drachillix](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drachillix)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2008, 5:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-firemen-sleep-on-the-job/440847/27 "2008-03-12T05:44:57Z")
[QUOTE=Ronald C. Semone] Why can’t they stay awake doing productive things around the fire station the way the firemen on the day shift do? [/QUOTE] Spoken like a city councilman in the making :dubious: A little insight into real world 24 hour shift working conditions. I was never employed as a firefighter but I was employed as an EMT/ambulance driver. 24 hour shifts could be brutal, its not horribly unusual to see an ambulance crew run 10-12 calls in a 24 hour shift (I did 17 once). When you start handing out duties for after hours they will quite often not get done, which results in people getting pissy about whos job it was on what day and are they dragging their ass in the feild to avoid doing their “chores”. Also depending on your states labor laws there are ways to avoid paying for the whole 24 hours. For us, if we had at least 5 hours sleep straight through from 9pm-6am we got paid 16 hours flat time. If we managed to break it up to where there were no 5 hour blocks of sleep we got paid 8 hours regular 4 hours OT and 9 hours double time. Bet your ass on a slow day we were out combing the ER’s at 1230am begging for a gurney required ER discharge (like people going back to convalescent hospitals) so we would get the “21” as we called it. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-firemen-sleep-on-the-job/440847.md?page=1)