Firefighters Facts

In October 2017 a wildfire forced Guy Fieri and his family out of their Santa Rosa home at 2 a.m. The house survived. By that weekend he and volunteers were feeding more than 5,000 evacuees and fire crews a day, by his own count. He has since cooked for crews at the Camp, Carr, Kincade and Dixie fires. On September 14, 2026 he served dinner to the crews at the Lucas Fire camp.

A fire threatened a pet store in Danbury, Connecticut, and strangers did not wait for instructions. Diners, drivers, and passersby formed a human chain outside the building. One by one, they passed out 86 puppy crates. Every single puppy survived because random people became a rescue line.

Two 14-year-old boys climbed to God's Thumb - a sheer volcanic bluff on the Oregon coast - and froze 30 feet from the top. A firefighter climbed up to rescue them and got stuck too. Coast Guard lowered a crew member from a helicopter and hoisted all three off the cliff face.

Bretagne, a golden retriever, worked Ground Zero for 10 days after 9/11 as a 2-year-old. She later responded to Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Ivan. When she died at 16 in 2016, firefighters lined the sidewalk and saluted her - then carried her out draped in an American flag.

Steve Buscemi was an FDNY firefighter with Engine 55 for four years before he became a movie star. When the World Trade Center fell on 9/11, he went back to his old firehouse. For five days he worked 12-hour shifts digging through the rubble. He declined every interview and photo request the whole time.

About two out of every three firefighters in America are volunteers. More than 18,000 U.S. fire departments have no paid staff at all. In those towns, a plumber, a teacher or a farmer answers the call. They leave the job the moment the pager goes off. That's still true in most of small-town America.

The Jaws of Life, the hydraulic tool that pries a wrecked car open, came out of a drag racing parts shop. George Hurst, who made the shifters in America's muscle cars, watched a crash crew take over an hour to free a driver in the 1960s and built a rescue tool of his own. His first weighed 350 pounds; the version that followed weighed 65. Fire crews still cut people out of cars with it every day.

The Ghostbusters firehouse is real. Ladder 8 has answered calls from it in Tribeca since 1903. In 2011 the city put it on a list of 20 fire companies to close, the neighborhood rallied, and it stayed open. One firefighter says about 20 people a day ask him if it is a real firehouse while he stands there in uniform. It is, and the truck still goes out.

The John J. Harvey was a New York fireboat the FDNY retired in 1994, and volunteers bought her at auction in 1999 and restored her. On September 11, 2001, the water mains at Ground Zero were broken, so the fire department radioed the old boat back to ask if her pumps still worked. Her volunteer crew pumped beside two FDNY fireboats for 80 hours. She is 95 now and still gives free public trips.

Denis Leary spent decades playing the angriest man in comedy. Six Worcester firefighters died in a 1999 warehouse fire, including his cousin Jerry Lucey. Leary didn't just grieve. He bought Boston a fireboat, sent rescue boats to New Orleans after Katrina, and helped fund the FDNY's first high-rise training simulator. More than 25 years later, he's still equipping firehouses nationwide.

A firestorm roared into the Old Faithful area of Yellowstone in 1988. Crews climbed onto the roof of the giant log hotel beside the geyser to save it. The fire threw embers the size of fists, and cabins nearby burned. Roof sprinklers added a year earlier kept the shingles wet, and crews beat out the sparks that caught. The Old Faithful Inn they saved still stands.

A chain-reaction crash on the Clark Memorial Bridge in Louisville sent a semi-truck dangling nearly 100 feet over the Ohio River with the driver trapped inside. Firefighter Bryce Carden, 29, was lowered by rope over the bridge edge, cut her free, harnessed her, and both were hoisted to safety. The whole rescue took 40 minutes.