Don't quit your day-job. Part-time fire fighters in rural fire departments.

While his colleagues try to secure a collapsed building after a landslide and watch out for new landslides, a school teacher, on a 2% contract as a part time fire fighter, and his colleagues (plumbers, a janitor and carpenters) have dug their way through the mud, rubble and furniture-remains, secured a tunnel-like entrance into the devastated building, and now carefully use an electric saw to safely free a toddler that has been stuck in the remains of the building for hours. This is what emergency response can look like in Norway.  In Norway, two thirds of the fire fighters are employed in part-time positions. For a majority of these, part time positions mean that they are basically only paid for some hours of training each year, a sum for agreeing to be on call at all times, and then in addition, for any call-outs that they respond to. They are people with other day-jobs, carrying a call-out radio with them at all times. In districts and rural areas, the backbone of the emergency response apparatus still is these part-part timers belonging to small services where typically only a couple of firefighters, the fire chief and some other key personnel, have full-time positions.  Still, these services are often first on site, before the ambulance and the police, and before backup arrives from other areas, in a variety of emergencies. Experience from several incidents has shown that they tend to perform impressively in these situations. Deeply embedded in the communities they serve, highly motivated, and staffed with people from a variety of occupations, they seem to have a flexibility and adaptive capacity that is effective both in emergencies and while developing their services.   Ongoing and planned consolidation of the fire services will change the role of part time firefighters, but effective fire and rescue services will still depend on them. And, as they are “volunteers” in the sense that the money they are paid for their work is quite small, and hardly the main motivating factor, it will be important to preserve this resource.   PTFFs are quite rarely studied. That has earlier been the case for us as well. Throughout a decade of our own research in the sector, they have typically played a secondary role. The typical interviewee would, in most projects, be full time personnel talking about the PTFFs.  Our presentation is based on research in the sector over more than a decade but focuses mainly on a recent study of two rural fire departments. We discuss how such organizations, and their employees, seem to have some particular qualities that make them more effective than a quick glance on an organizational map, their equipment inventory and not least their budgets would suggest. Our analytical focus is on networks in relation to the community, the motivation among the personnel, and how the heterogeneity of background and skills among the fire fighters can be a resource. Moreover, we discuss the social and material embeddedness, historicity and organic nature of these abilities.