At 83, David Lemponen was in his sixth decade of responding to calls as a volunteer firefighter in Austinburg, a Northeast Ohio township that is home to a little more than 2,000 people in Ashtabula County.
He, with a half dozen or so other volunteers, worked out of the fire station nestled between the township building and an antiques store.
One rainy spring night, Lemponen responded to the scene of a car accident, like he had hundreds of times before. He was directing traffic when he was struck by a minivan traveling approximately 45 miles per hour, according to the U.S. Fire Administration.
He was life-flighted from the scene to a hospital in Cleveland.
“It’s engraved in my brain what he looked like, and he didn’t look recognizable,” his granddaughter, Katarina Plotz, said. “Because they pumped him with so much fluid trying to save him that he just blew up like a balloon.”
Both of his legs and all of his ribs were broken, she said. He was missing part of his skull.
He died from his injuries later that day.
When many Ohioans call 911, the people who show up to help in their darkest hours are volunteers, sometimes rushing to the scene from their other jobs or spending their retirement continuing to fight fires, respond to car accidents and recover bodies. Nearly three quarters of departments in the state are made up of these volunteers.
Lemponen’s family tried to get him to stop volunteering to no avail, Plotz said.
“I know my mom wanted him to stop, but she was basically like, ‘You’re going to do what you want anyway,’” she said. “My grandma was the same way. She wanted him to stop, but he’s going to do whatever he wants anyway.”
By the time he died, Lemponen had six decades of on-the-job training that helped guide him through the hundreds of calls he responded to. While many of the state’s volunteer firefighters are like Lemponen, with decades of real-world experience, few are coming up to replace them.
The number of active volunteer certifications has decreased by nearly 15% since January 2020, according to data from the Ohio Department of Public Safety. Perhaps more concerning, the Ohio Task Force on Volunteer Fire Service, which looked into the problems facing Ohio’s volunteer departments, found new recruits just starting out may only be getting 15% of the training the average paid firefighter gets.
A weekend’s worth of training
Over a bright and windy August weekend, 21 firefighters from across the state completed their 36 hours of training at the Ohio Fire Academy in Reynoldsburg near Columbus. They rotated through different training scenarios, took state tests at night, broke for meals in the cafeteria and slept in the on-site dorms.
The campus is sprawling, scattered with houses where recruits learn to ventilate a building or force entry; railroad cars where they can respond to simulated derailments; and a five-story tower lined with fire escapes that can be filled with smoke for them to practice search-and-rescue and ladder work.
A bay near the administration building was mostly empty. Typically, it’s filled with semitrucks and trailers that deliver specific training to departments across the state, Ohio Fire Academy Assistant Chief Dave Belcher said.
“There’s a search-and-rescue. There’s a mobile driving simulator. There’s a grain bin,” he said. “These two are what we call Class B. We actually burn propane in those and so they can do live fire in a very, very controlled setting.”
The academy delivers them to all of Ohio’s 88 counties, so volunteer firefighters can get additional training. But that’s optional. Volunteer firefighters can begin responding to fires and other emergencies with just a 36-hour training course. They’re responding to the same emergencies as paid firefighters, who are usually required to receive a 240-hour certificate, and often are facing bigger fires with fewer people, the task force report found.
“Guess how long my volunteer training was in 1978? Thirty-six hours long. (Now) it is almost the exact same training that I took in 1978,” State Fire Marshal Kevin Reardon said about the state’s current volunteer certification. “Meanwhile, the threats, the fire risks, the fire hazards, they’ve all increased. Line-of-duty deaths, they’ve all increased. So to keep a training model that only really gives you the minimal training is not helpful to the communities, and it puts that person at risk, especially for a job that pays nothing.”
The unfunded mandate
Firefighter training is split between two departments at the state level. The Department of Public Safety sets the training standards, and the State Fire Marshal’s Office, under the Department of Commerce, is tasked with training firefighters.
The state calls the certification an “introductory, awareness level course” that introduces students to “basic elements of fire ground safety and support operations.” The task force report states the training covers critical information “quickly and ineffectively.”
“Volunteer firefighters can’t go inside a structure that’s burning right now, and I wouldn’t recommend it with the training that they’ve had,” Reardon said. “Now I did in 1978, but we didn’t know any better in 1978. We know a lot better now how risky that is to send a volunteer with 36 hours of training into a burning structure. It’s very dangerous.”
But the lack of training doesn’t necessarily stop volunteer firefighters from doing just that, he said.
“There’s tons of volunteers out there that we know they’re doing it. Division of EMS (Emergency Medical Services) knows they’re doing it, but they’re put in an awkward situation,” Reardon said. “They’re not gonna stay outside if they think that they can make a save. They’re not going to sit outside and just wait because they don’t have the training.”
Hazmat training, which the National Transportation Safety Board recommended the state add in the wake of the East Palestine train derailment, is also not included in the volunteer certification. The Fire Marshal’s Office takes that training on the road. It’s optional, and it takes a full work week to complete, Reardon said, which means some volunteers don’t take it.
“They need to be at what we call the awareness level, where they know how to use the emergency response guide. They know some basic things,” he said. “That’s about 40 hours of training, but that’s still 40 hours of training.”
Training for volunteers became easier to access when the Fire Marshal’s Office, based on a recommendation from the task force report, made all training, including online courses, at the Ohio Fire Academy free in fall 2023 to all volunteer departments. Since May 2024, 289 volunteer firefighters have taken some sort of educational course — whether it’s the 36-hour training or a continuing education class — for free at the Ohio Fire Academy, according to the State Fire Marshal’s Office.
But volunteers still need to spend an entire weekend away from work and their families to get the certification at the fire academy.
Training doesn’t stop after those 36 hours. The certification must be renewed every three years with 36 more hours of continuing education.
That puts volunteer fire departments in a bind, Duncan Falls Fire Chief Don Alexander said. No one wants to send people into emergency situations unprepared, but if the state asks too much of their volunteers, they’ll struggle to recruit enough people to keep their departments staffed.
“If you take away the 36-hour class that lets them, in my department, fight fire, then our lure to get people in there is gone,” Alexander said.
Although some of the financial barriers have been lifted, dedicating the time to training continues to be a struggle.
Fires burn faster as response times lag
“It’s a real different world in Southern Ohio and Appalachia, as I term it,” Alexander said.
He’s been chief since 1980 in the small community of Wayne Township in Muskingum County, just outside of Zanesville. A local hospital — 15 minutes from their station — provides emergency medical services, he said, but his department provides fire services not just to Wayne Township but two other townships.
“It’s 74 square miles, we’re it, and mutual aid, we’re fortunate there’s one department across the river from us,” Alexander said. “That’s a mile away. In the daytime, they have one person, if he’s home, and after that, we’re … miles to the nearest mutual aid department.”
The department across the Muskingum River is in the village of Philo. The retired fire chief there is usually the only person available to respond to an emergency during the day, Alexander said.
Like a lot of rural areas in Ohio, Wayne Township is changing. More residential communities are popping up, Alexander said. Old farmland is being converted into housing developments.
“People that move into our township, generally, they came from town, where you called 911 and the service showed up two minutes later,” he said. “They have a hard time grasping that, ‘Hey, somebody has to get out of bed, go to the station, get the truck, come to the scene, and it ain’t gonna be me. We just want service.’”
Often, like Alexander said, volunteer firefighters who are called to an emergency have to drop everything at their full-time jobs, drive to the fire station, hop on an engine and ride out to the scene. All of that adds precious minutes to their response time. And as fewer people work in the communities they live in, it takes even longer for volunteers with other jobs to arrive at the scene of an emergency.
“Response times for volunteer fire departments can be more than 15 minutes,” the task force report states. “EMS responses can be even longer, thus cutting into the ‘golden hour’ that is needed to get victims to an appropriate trauma center.”
The National Fire Protection Association’s Standard 1710, which provides minimum requirements for career fire departments, states a first engine should arrive on scene in four minutes. Very few volunteer departments in Ohio are hitting that goal. The NFPA recognizes that standard is practically impossible for volunteer departments, but the failure to get close to the standard shows how dangerous the fires volunteer departments are responding to are, both for the firefighters and the community.
“They do their best at it, but that’s just not ideal at all. Because by the time they get to a structure, the only fire to put out is what’s left of whatever’s fallen by then,” Reardon said. “They’re not going to make any saves. With a 10-minute response time, you’re not going to save anything or anybody. You’re just not. You’re not even going to save the mailbox. It’s bad.”
No statewide agency regularly collates response time data from volunteer fire departments, and Ideastream Public Media’s multiple requests to obtain this and related data were denied. The Department of Commerce did provide response time data from 2020 to 2022 that was included in the task force report, but did not provide more recent data.
In 2022, the average response time for a volunteer fire department was 8.7 minutes, according to a data analysis by Ideastream Public Media, compared to 7.5 minutes for part-time departments and 6.3 minutes for full-time departments.
Volunteer fire departments’ response times are more than two minutes longer on average than fully paid departments.
Response times are significantly longer at night for all departments, but volunteer departments have the largest spike. Average response times jump to nearly 11 minutes at 5 a.m. for volunteer departments.
As ZIP codes get more rural, average response times increase for all departments. Rural communities are often served by volunteer departments due to funding constraints, the task force report found.
The fires that firefighters are battling these days are burning fast, Reardon said, making a quick response time more important than ever.
“You used to have five to six minutes to get out of your house probably 10 years ago, if you had working smoke detectors,” he said. “Now that statistic is less than three minutes, and it’s because of the nature of materials that go into build(ing) your house or your apartment and the fibers in your clothing, fibers in this chair, fibers in the carpet, the adhesive that holds the carpet down. All of those things make fires burn faster and hotter.”
As response times lag, some departments have tried to come up with solutions, like paying a firefighter part time to respond to calls during busy call times, supplementing the volunteers. They can be the first one on the scene, and though they wouldn’t technically be allowed to fight any fires without backup, they could start assessing the blaze and setting up equipment, bringing the department’s response time down.
“They can at least get one piece of equipment out so that volunteers can respond from their home directly to the scene,” Reardon said. “That cuts that time down a little bit, but with fires and EMS runs, it’s all about seconds. It’s not minutes, it’s about seconds.”
For departments like Don Alexander’s in Wayne Township, that’s just not feasible, he said.
“To pay people or make it fully paid or whatever would be an astronomical cost that our area could never afford,” he said.
The generational sacrifice
Volunteer firefighters lose time with their families and take absences that risk their full-time jobs for dangerous assignment after dangerous assignment.
Yet they still show up for their communities, day and night.
For the Lemponens, volunteer firefighting became the family business. David Lemponen’s daughter followed in her father’s footsteps, becoming a volunteer firefighter and serving alongside her dad in the Austinburg Volunteer Fire Department for 30 years.
“They do it because they want to help their community however they can,” State Fire Marshal Kevin Reardon said. “And at the same time, they know the risks. They’re willing to put down their life for somebody else’s.”
Some are taking up the call, following their family members into the service or becoming a first-generation volunteer firefighter to serve their community, but the numbers continue to decline each year. Many of those who do answer the call will put their lives on the line for their communities with subpar training, no pay and no one to replace them when they leave.
Tomorrow, we’ll learn about the sacrifices volunteer firefighters make to keep their communities safe.
Kendall Crawford contributed reporting for this story.