One other thing I've recently learned is that outside of cities, fire departments are mostly volunteer. Here in the Vacaville Fire Protection District (most of northwest Solano county, which burned heavily in the LNU complex) the department is 90% volunteers. And that's fairly typical.
Hah, growing up in a rural area, I assumed that fire departments were volunteer-based everywhere, and didn't discover otherwise until I moved to a large city.
(I recently applied)