9 episodes · 3h 32m
Mutual Aid
Twenty-eight years as chief of a volunteer fire department in a township of four hundred people, one call at a time.
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A volunteer fire department is the only institution most townships have that everybody pays for, nobody staffs, and everybody assumes will be there.
He joined in nineteen fifty-four wanting a nozzle and was handed a lantern. He was chief from nineteen sixty-six to nineteen ninety-four. Each episode is one call, and the call is almost never the story — the story is the eleven minutes before it, or the forty years of Tuesday nights that made eleven minutes possible, or the thing somebody did in a yard at half past ten that nobody wrote down.
Nothing burns down that anybody would call a loss. That is not the point and it never was.