OK, I'll join in.

I'm in Bucks County, PA.

EMS is mostly paid here, Fire is volunteer, I am unaware of any paid companies, but there might be in the south end of the county, which is nothing like the north (rural) end of the county where I live.

We have very, very low volunteer rates. The volunteers we have are mostly overweight men in their 40's and 50's, with the exception of a few.

In PA, Firefighter 1, Hazmat, First Responder and the rest of the initial training is about 200 hours. That's without EMT, and without Auto Extrication, both of which are basically core calls.

In Upper Bucks County, the fire companies are seriously under-funded, and the company I used to run with barely got any money at all from the municipalities, so there's a lot of fund raising too. Add to that running the corporation of the fire company and it's a LOT of non-fire time. All in, I calculated for the small company I was with, you were looking at about 480 hours a year in training, fundraising and meetings (9.2 hours a week), and with calls that jumped to 550 hours a year (10.5 hours a week). Remember the old ""One weekend a month, two weeks a year" - a former recruiting slogan used by the U.S. Army National Guard? Yeah, well a small Rural Fire Company has more of a time commitment than that. (admittedly they don't use that slogan any more)

In the last 5 years of my service with the fire company, we added only TWO members under the age of 25 (the Chief's son and the Assistant Chief's son) and all of the others who joined were out within the first 20 months of service.