Photo by Steve Baer | FireDog Photos
Modern, responder‑focused alerting is reshaping firefighter health, performance, and the future of the fire service
If you care about the tradition of fire service, you ought to care about the future of it. And right now, the future is pretty reliant upon fixing the recruitment and retention problem. At the risk of sounding like a doomsday reporter, I’ll start off with some stats that paint the picture:
Since 2008, we’ve lost an average of about 12,000 volunteer firefighters per year (dropping from roughly 827,000 down to around 635,000 by 2023). That’s nearly a quarter of the force gone, while call volumes have jumped about 70% in the same period (from 25 million to 42 million calls) (NFPA, 2026).
The career fire service hasn’t seen as sheer of a drop-off, but it has also taken a hit as responders across the U.S. are looking for other ways to make a living without exposing themselves to the risks of the fire service.
The good news is the fire service exists to solve problems. This will be resolved.
Built to Adapt and Overcome
For as long as there have been fires to fight, the men and women fighting those fires have been adapting and overcoming. Once we put our heads together, we tackle any challenge and extinguish it.
We’ve tackled some big problems in recent history: cancer risk, mental health, sleep health, and shift schedules. That’s just in the past 20 years. Each of these frontiers took concerted effort from individuals, organizations, and buy-in from the entire fire service.
None of these efforts are about making the fire service “less risky” or putting bubble wrap on responders. They’re about making the firefighter more effective and allowing them to get the most out of the best career in the world for 25+ years and enjoy a long retirement when all is said and done.
The inherent risks will always be there, and it will always take a special person to be a firefighter.
If you want a “safe job,” don’t become a firefighter. If you want to push yourself to the limits and protect those around you, you won’t find a more fulfilling career than one in the fire service.
What the Last Frontiers Taught Us
The pattern is familiar. We notice a risk that’s been normalized for years, gather the data to confirm the true problem, and then we fix that problem with tools, policies, and practices. The results lead to better health outcomes, increased recruitment and retention, and an improved fire service.
Frontier No. 1: Cancer risk reduction
Twenty years ago, a lot of today’s standard practices would have sounded excessive. Now they’re becoming the baseline:
- Second sets of clean bunker gear
- Decontamination equipment
- Annual cancer screenings
- Clean cab concept
Politicians then came in to support these efforts further by recognizing cancer-related deaths as line-of-duty deaths and presumption laws that state that a firefighter’s cancer is presumed to be from the job until it has been proven otherwise.
These efforts have directly reduced carcinogenic risk, extended careers, and provided much needed support to firefighters and their families who deal with job-related cancer diagnoses.
Frontier No. 2: Shift schedules
Shift schedules have evolved over the years as community needs for the fire department have changed. It began with station-based availability from volunteers who just responded as quickly as they could around the clock. As cities began to grow and need more consistent response times, the 24/48 shift became the standard.
Recently, several other shift schedules have become popular, including 48/96, Kelly shift, 1-3-2-3 and now the 24/72 as researchers point to the three days of rest as key to recovery for personal health and performance.
The key point wasn’t preference, it was physiology. Chronic sleep deprivation impairs cognitive abilities, weakens the immune system, and increases the risk of conditions like Alzheimer’s, obesity and cancer (Jahnke & Hollerbach, 2026).
Any adjustments to shift schedules that improve sleep for firefighters have widespread benefits.
That’s why fire station alerting is the next frontier in health and safety, as it directly affects sleep health while on shift.
Forward Momentum for the Fire Service
For the last couple of decades, the fire service has made important strides forward with two big health and safety focuses: reducing cancer risk and rethinking shift schedules.
Both have changed what “taking care of our people” looks like. Results from these initiatives have extended careers, saved lives, and set the stage for meaningful retirements for firefighters across the globe.
There’s a new frontier upon the fire service today, and it directly impacts every responder around the clock: station alerting.
Loud and jarring fire station alerting systems have been part of the job for decades.
Seven years ago, we (at EaseAlert) began asking the question: “Does alerting have to be startling?” … We got mixed feedback. I’d say 3 out of every 10 firefighters I spoke to believed it was important to make a change at that time. Today, closer to 8 out of 10 firefighters that we speak with agree that fire station alerting standards need to modernize.
This is quickly becoming the next “no-brainer” improvement for firehouses everywhere.
Think about your firehouse. If you asked your shift, “Does alerting have to be startling?” what would they say?
The Next Frontier: From Fire Station Alerting to Firefighter Alerting
For a job where less than your best can mean the difference between life and death, we must eliminate unnecessary risks.
Researchers have found that firefighters are up to 14.1 times more likely to die from sudden cardiac death during alarm response than during non-emergency duties (Kales et al, 2007).
Fire station alerting systems directly affect how often you wake up (especially in multi-company firehouses), how abruptly you wake, how quickly your body floods with stress hormones, how well you hear and understand the message, and more.
In our pursuit of modernizing the fire station alerting process, we’ve begun asking, “Should we be alerting the fire station or the firefighter?”
For decades, alerting systems have prioritized coverage over precision. As long as everyone in the fire station heard the alert, then it was an effective system. Firefighter alerting allows for precision. You don’t need to blast a loud audible alarm throughout the entire firehouse if the rescue gets a low acuity call. Sorry rescue crew, but the truck doesn’t need to wake up for your 3 a.m. lift assist calls.
This responder-centric design ensures the responders assigned to the call get the alert immediately while those who don’t need to respond don’t get blasted with a loud audible alert for the sake of coverage.
By focusing on the firefighter instead of the fire station, we can build a system around only notifying the responders who are assigned to the call and providing personal alerting devices that enhance the alerting process. This is a simple change, but improves the alerting process in several crucial ways:
- Tactile alerts: less startling and more effective
- Unit-specific alerts: to only wake up the responders assigned to the call (even in shared bunk rooms)
- Firefighter focused devices: built for the tough environments firefighters face
Why?
Some of the most impactful innovations in the fire service began by asking “Why?”
Why are firefighters getting diagnosed with cancer at higher rates than the general population?
Why do we work this shift schedule?
When it comes to the most pervasive system you rely on 24/7, it’s important to reassess it often. I encourage you to think about this and bring it back to your firehouse. Why are we alerting the station, and not the responder?
No, this will not make firefighting completely safe or remove all risks from alarm response. No, this will not eliminate the adrenaline you need to respond to a working fire. Those aspects are inherent to the job.
This is about ensuring you have the right tools in the right places to be as effective as possible when duty calls.
And if you don’t have the most effective tools for the job, why not?
