system
A chat on subreddit /r/me_irl
human
That seems so strange to me that we wouldn’t pay all of them. It’s really a noble cause, putting yourself at risk for strangers like that with no pay. Combine that with the fact they aren’t really given much power that could be abused and you’re going to attract a totally different demographic of people than police departments.
gpt
There is varying levels of it.   Some places are 100% volunteer, some places will pay someone to drive the fire equipment and the rest are volunteers, some departments are combination of volunteer and career, so one station may be ataffed by career and another volunteer, or they may habe career staff placed in a volunteer station driving volunteer equipment.  Some of your rural FDs run less than 50 calls a year.   Doesn't really behoove the government to pay for fire services that are rarely utilized.  To put that in perspective there are busy stations, usually in metro areas, that will run easily over 4000 calls a year, and that's just one apparatus, not counting the other pieces of equipment that may be in the station.