When Ed Walker responds to a call, it’s often something for something routine, like resetting the smoke detector or monitoring carbon monoxide levels.
The person who requested the Peterborough Fire Department’s help, he said, often thinks the only reason he showed up alone — and not with a larger team or firetruck — is because additional support wasn’t needed.
That’s not necessarily the case. Sometimes, no one else can come.
“Quite honestly, sometimes there is no cavalry there,” said Walker, the Peterborough fire chief. “We’re just really lucky that me or another chief officer was able to get there and solve the problem and didn’t need that cavalry.”
Unlike career departments that are typically found in cities and larger population areas, most of small-town New Hampshire fire departments operate on a part-time or volunteer basis. Some, like Peterborough, are a combination, employing a chief and one or two full-time firefighters, then relying heavily on per diem responders and other towns’ departments for support.
Aside from Walker and his deputy, who are full-time employees of the town, the Peterborough Fire Department runs on an on-call basis, drawing from a reserve of roughly 25 firefighters who can choose when they want to work.
The per-diem nature of local fire service makes it difficult to respond to larger emergencies, Walker said, especially at certain times of day. In the evenings, as many as 18 people might show up. During the workday, it’s often just a handful. That’s sufficient for most calls, but it can get hairy quickly if local volunteers and mutual aid don’t come through.
“We are relying on our responders to stop whatever they’re doing in the real world, come down here and go on calls during the daytime,” Walker said. “That can be a challenge, because most people have full-time jobs.”
Those reserves have dwindled in the 12 years that Walker has been on the job. Many people work multiple jobs or have family responsibilities, he said, and employers that used to let workers leave to respond to fire calls don’t anymore.
“The concept of volunteerism is down,” he said. “People really don’t have the capacity anymore to volunteer in the communities … The total amount of time people have to volunteer has really decreased.”
The situation is similar in small towns across the state.
In Canterbury, near the capital, Chief Michael Gamache works part-time after retiring from 37 years at the Manchester Fire Department. The switch took him from a staff of 200 to a town of roughly 2,000.
“There was no problem. It was us, and if we had something big, we called the suburb stations to basically cover our station, occasionally to come to the scene,” Gamache said at a recent breakfast meeting of capital-area chiefs. “180-degree [turn] in coming to Canterbury. Now, it’s just me and whoever shows up.”
The back-up isn’t guaranteed, however, and it isn’t always timely. Sometimes, it can take 20 minutes for firefighters to come help from several towns over, leaving some short-handed.
“You’re stuck,” said Ben Arey, a fire captain in Northwood. “You’ve got to do a size-up, you’ve got to do stuff like that, but at one point you’re sitting there watching the building burn. What are you going to do, you know? You don’t have enough people to be able to do anything. You do what you can, but you’ll look kind of foolish there.”
National standards dictate that when firefighters arrive on the scene, two should head inside and assist each other, while two others should stay outside the building to monitor them and initiate rescue or call for back-up if needed.
“Before you even step in the building, you’re supposed to have four guys,” said Keith Gilbert, who leads the Capital Area Mutual Aid Fire Compact. “That’s not happening.”
It wasn’t always like this, Arey said. About a decade ago, he recalled, people used to clamor for a seat on the truck. Some departments had waitlists to join. Now, he’s relieved because this coming week will be the first time in about six months he will have a fully staffed shift schedule.
Hancock’s alternate experience
For all intents and purposes, Hancock should be in the same boat. There are 26 people on its roster, all of them volunteers.
On average, however, Chief Tom Bates said he gets eight or nine people who show up to run-of-the-mill calls. For larger ones, like car wrecks and first-alarm fires, that number is more like 16 to 18.
Bates has pondered the reason for Hancock’s strong turnout many times over his 20-odd years at the department, but he hasn’t found a concrete answer.
“The people want to be there,” Bates said. “The guys want to be on the department and participate, whether it’s just showing up to wash the trucks or clean up or respond to calls. It’s a good atmosphere that we have.”
Hancock averages about 200 calls for service each year and pays its volunteers about $15 an hour.
The department skews older — Bates estimated the average age is mid-50s — but young people are beginning to step up, too. Most of his reserves have also been trained in emergency medical services at one point or another, Bates said.
While some towns request mutual aid to cover their stations while the few available firefighters respond to a call, Bates said Hancock has never had to do that.
“In some respects, we feel we might be better off than some in the area,” Bates said. “We feel pretty confident in being able to keep things going.”
Zooming out
Aspiring firefighters are trained at the New Hampshire Fire Academy, where they must complete two certifications to join the service. Mark Wholey, director of the fire academy, said it has the capacity to train and certify more than 200 first responders each year.
Someone can become a firefighter in as little as 10 weeks if they take the courses concurrently, which Wholey said is popular among most of the younger applicants who are targeting the fire service as a career. Others who may be older with families or making a career switch tend to opt for a nights-and-weekends schedule, which takes about six months to finish.
Wholey said he’s taking a two-pronged approach to filling the workforce through the fire academy — one of career firefighters and one of volunteers. Those who work part-time or volunteer aren’t legally required to have any certification, but they aren’t eligible for full-time employment unless they’re certified in both Firefighter I and Firefighter II courses.
Though local departments are struggling to find and keep their staff, the state has one thousand more licensed career firefighters than 10 years ago, according to data from the state’s Department of Safety. In 2025, 3,089 individuals held state-issued Firefighter II certifications, though a department spokesperson said that doesn’t mean they are actively working or living in New Hampshire.
Most of the academy’s classes are full, Wholey said, though 10 to 15% of those who start the academy don’t finish. Some people aren’t mentally or physically prepared for the reality of the profession, which he said involves understanding the science behind a blaze, how to fight different types of fires, and learning to respond to traumatic scenes.
“You might think that firefighting is the red firetruck going down the street. Get off, go get a hose and squirt water to put the fire out,” Wholey said. “The truth of the matter is, you’re starting a journey that is incredibly dynamic and incredibly challenging.”
On the flip side, firefighters often retire early or change careers. The job can be draining emotionally and mentally, and firefighters face high cancer risks due to carcinogenic chemicals in their protective gear. Because of those risks, the state’s pension system also allows firefighters to retire with full benefits as early as age 52.5 after 25 years of service.
John McAllister, secretary-treasurer of the Professional Fire Fighters of New Hampshire union, said modifications to the pension formula about 15 years ago, combined with the career risks, were a turnoff for some people.
“I think that some of the younger generation is looking at this and saying, ‘Is this a profession I really want to get into?'” McAllister said.
When fire departments do get trainees or newly certified firefighters, Arey said, the existing firefighters have less institutional knowledge to share.
“Either they’re aging out, retiring, moving on, whatever, so anytime you get somebody that can actually start to train new people, the old ones are gone and they’re not being trained as good,” Arey said. “I think we’ve lost a lot of that over the years.”
Local pressures
Aside from workforce trends, some volunteer and part-time departments struggle to attract and retain experienced firefighters.
In much of New Hampshire, taxpayers are either unwilling or unable to handle ever-increasing property taxes. Still, the fire chiefs said that no matter how restricted their budgets become, they’re charged with finding a way to respond quickly and efficiently when every second matters.
Several said they sympathize with taxpayers’ concerns. At the same time, their expectation for the level of service they want doesn’t always match the level of service they’re willing to pay for in the town budget.
“We’re struggling to meet the demand for service with the right equipment to deliver that service, and we all realize that the money is coming out of the same people’s wallets,” said Tom Blanchette, the fire chief in Loudon.
Some of the chiefs also lamented the struggle of getting new equipment that they feel would better serve the town and attract more hires. Blanchette asked voters to approve a $1.7 million bond for a new aerial ladder firetruck last year and received a resounding “no.”
Residents were “voting our wallets,” as one put it last year, and aiming to save as much money as possible. They also shot down Blanchette’s request this year to draw $600,000 from a trust fund for a used truck.
In Hancock, Bates said he’s satisfied with his department’s “cutting-edge” equipment. The town appropriated $177,000 to fire services last year, which includes things like fuel, hourly pay, insurance and maintenance. It is separate from other expenses that are often absorbed into fire departments, like building inspections.
“We do spend a lot of the budget on maintenance,” Bates said. “We want to be proactive rather than reactive.”
Loudon, however, isn’t alone in its penny-pinching. Northwood has operated on a default budget for years, and Chichester Chief Tim Robinson said he has no full-time staff.
Like Hancock, Chichester uses a paid-on-call system. It’s cheaper — the town doesn’t have to pay employee benefits — but turnout from volunteers and mutual aid can be unreliable.
“Currently, that’s acceptable to the people of town,” Robinson said, but when a town leans on mutual aid, “you’re relying on the taxpayers from different communities to take care of your call, and that’s not right.”
Mutual aid allows towns to work together, but they also have to compete.
In Loudon, which is a combination department, Blanchette said he hopes to increase the pay range for his more experienced full-time staff up to $28 an hour after voters approved the town budget. At the same time, he just got wind that a nearby town has raised its starting wage to $28, which is likely to attract more people.
Towns with higher wages, newer equipment and bigger staffs tend to win out, Blanchette said. Over the past few years, Loudon has lost three people to Franklin, three to Belmont, three to Concord, two to Hooksett and one each to Exeter and Farmington.
At the Loudon fire station is a board with tiny gold plaques, where members who stay past five years, past 10 years, past 15 and 20 get their names engraved. It’s been maintained since 1997 and is less than half-full.
Only 18 have stayed past five years. Not many are still with the department.
When Blanchette sees it, he thinks about all the things that can drive someone away from the profession — the intense emotional pressure, the physical toll, the life moments missed.
“The mental burden of doing this job, eventually, you sit down one day and say, ‘OK. I wake up every night at 2:30 in the morning and see ghosts,'” he said. “‘I’ve missed my grandkids’ birthdays, I missed Christmas morning, I had to get up in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner, and my wallet is no thicker … Is this worth it?'”
