E.g. if you're a smallish village (say <1000 people), you cannot afford to pay a living wage to the 10 people or so you will need at least to fight a good sized fire, especially if a fire too big for a regular fire extinguisher happens once every few years.
You could of course pay those 10 people to look after a bunch of villages at the same time, but then you get a lot of fighting about where they will be actually located, etc.
In larger cities or on factory grounds it makes sense of course to keep a permanent paid staff because "enough" bad things keep happening, and especially with certain kinds of factories you want expert firefighters specially trained for certain types of events (like large scale chemical fires).
In a lot of smaller places the community also wants to keep volunteer fire fighters, as they are basically the only "community thing" happening at all, especially since churches and church activities become less and less popular.
Volunteer fire fighters are a tradition.
It's rather common around where I live that each village of more than a few houses does an "Easter Fire"[1] event once a year (of course), and those things are quite commonly organized by the volunteer firefighters who then use the profits from selling beer and food to fund their group's fun activities over the year, be it buying beer, soda and snacks for their regular meetings, be it a foosball table, and minor things like that. And that Easter Fire event often times really is the only major event happening at all during the year in that village.
Other volunteer organizations like the THW (mostly disaster relifef) or the DLRG (volunteer-ish life guards) are considered important for community building as well. And it's always good to have a lot of people around who at least have basic training in these kinds of things should the far fewer paid professionals be overwhelmed in case of major disasters like the flooding right now.
To rephrase, why can’t the gov actually pay the volunteers? It seems weird that they are given snacks and water, in exchange for dangerous labor.
if you are employed and a volunteer firefighter your company has to let you go if an emergency breaks out AND they have to continue paying you. so you keep your normal wages during your service times.
then they can claim (varying in exact detail from state to state) these costs and get money from the goverment
Why do people working in extenuating circumstances, providing disaster relief that is crucial to society, not get paid? Continuing to get your normal wages is the bare minimum. Companies benefit from restoring society, otherwise, they can forget about business continuity.
Seems to me that the people are being exploited. I guess this has worked historically, so locals don’t see anything wrong with it. But as an outsider, it’s super weird.
In the Netherlands, about 15% of firefighters are paid; in most other European countries I know of it's less.
One would imagine the high tax rates in such EU countries can afford to have paid disaster relief troops.