No Time to Burn : Volunteers: Sierra Madre’s 44 unpaid firefighters triumph over the demands of busy lives to protect their city.

When the mountains flanking the town were burning out of control, they stood their ground stubbornly, hoses in hand, feeling the hot breath of fire creeping down from the ridge toward defensive positions surrounding a scattering of seemingly doomed houses in Bailey Canyon.

After a marathon test of nerves, the volunteers of the Sierra Madre Fire Department emerged victorious, and exhausted, from the firestorms of October, 1993. Assisted by outside strike teams and helicopter tankers, they halted the Kinneloa blaze, which had cut a swath of destruction in its eastward race across the San Gabriel Mountains. Not a single home was lost in this town’s warren of highly combustible canyons.

But firefighting skill and extraordinary valor don’t tell the entire story of the only all-volunteer Fire Department in Los Angeles County. Maybe the real heroism in Sierra Madre is in the battle against time.

In an era of two-career families and frantic schedules, the town’s 44 firefighters work the equivalent of two jobs, one paid and the other compensated by the occasional thrill of danger--and the rarefied satisfaction of donating untold hours of labor to their community. They’re all on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, living at the mercy of the pagers on their belts and night stands.

Between emergencies, they participate in regular training sessions, field drills, meetings and fund-raising activities that typically add about 20 hours--nearly 40 hours for the more zealous--to a workweek. But instead of merely coping on the edge of distraction with job pressures and social obligations, they somehow manage to balance their time and pool their resources in a way that defies the limitations of the clock.

What motivates these men and women? It’s not just the adrenaline rush of fighting fires and pulling crash victims out of mangled cars. Something greater is at play here, some intangible but energizing force that the firefighters themselves find difficult to articulate.

Perhaps they can offer some valuable clues on how to deal with the challenges of gluing together today’s beleaguered communities and distressed institutions. The secret, it seems, involves gaining the upper hand over time.

Paramount Pictures executive Ed Tracy, for one, has found time for the last nine years to volunteer as Sierra Madre’s fire chief.

Recently promoted to head of new business development for the film studio’s back-lot operations, he has been traveling so much lately that he had to delegate some of his fire duties to three deputies. But Tracy, 44, son of a volunteer fire chief on Long Island and an unpaid firefighter for most of his adult life, is on the razor’s edge when he’s back home.

One Sunday this summer, Tracy was enjoying an unusual stretch of leisure time with his son at the nearby Eaton Canyon driving range, introducing 6-year-old Eddie to golf--a game he himself started learning only last year. Just as they were leaving the parking lot, Tracy’s pager released a familiar shrill tone, followed by the urgent voice of a radio dispatcher.

They raced to a home on Auburn Street, where an electrical fire had engulfed the basement in flames, and Tracy took command of two truck companies already there. Fires in basements are rare in California because of the scarcity of basements, but they can be deadly when firefighters are blinded by smoke. Tracy did lots of basement fires in New York, luckily, and his crews snuffed this one out quickly.

Father and son spent the rest of their Sunday afternoon mopping up at the fire scene. No big deal for little Eddie, who like his father is being raised in the cult of the volunteer firefighter.

Why does Tracy do this? Dorothy Hobiack, a longtime Sierra Madre resident who is grateful for having twice received emergency medical aid from the Fire Department, recalls a revealing remark Tracy made to a homeowners association a few years ago:

“Some men play golf. Some play tennis. We play fireman.”

Tracy, a taciturn man, admits that his firefighting obsession does add challenges to his professional and family life. His wife, Katherine, is busy too; she’s vice president for corporate finance at Warner Bros.

But corporate skills in time management--the discipline of copious planning and advance coordination of schedules--makes life tolerable, Tracy said.

“I’m busier than a one-armed paperhanger in a windstorm,” he said. “But you make it work. If you want to be successful and you want to contribute to your community, you just have to find a way to make it work.”

The vast majority of the nation’s 1.5 million firefighters are unpaid volunteers, continuing a time-honored American tradition of communal barn-raising and mutual aid.

About half of California’s 522 fire departments are staffed primarily by hard-working volunteers, according to the state fire marshal’s office. Volunteer firefighting, however, survives largely as a rural phenomenon. With rare exceptions, the urban centers of Southern California rely on paid career firefighters.

Other than Sierra Madre, the notable exceptions in Los Angeles County are the cities of La Habra Heights, Avalon and La Verne, which have department rosters filled mostly by volunteers. Acton has a band of six firefighters, all volunteers, but 911 calls are answered by paid county firefighters.

Further distinguishing the Sierra Madre Fire Department, local boosters say, is an intensive program of training and education that earns it a reputation for professional-level skills in firefighting and emergency medical services.

Tracy, who is elected annually by his peers to serve as fire chief, grates over the use of the term professional to differentiate between career firefighters and unpaid volunteers. These aren’t folks in overalls passing buckets of water down a line, hand to hand.

“We’re highly trained professionals,” he snapped.

Indeed, Ron Jones, battalion chief in the nearby El Monte Fire Department, praises his colleagues in Sierra Madre. “I’ve worked with them on strike teams in big fires, and there’s absolutely no difference between their skills and [those of] career firefighters,” he said.

Hard training, Tracy says, has helped the department maintain a fine safety record since its creation in 1921. Although one volunteer died in a brush fire in the 1950s, the only serious accident in recent memory occurred when a firefighter fell off the tail board of an engine racing up the street about 20 years ago. He spent one night in the hospital.

Keeping safe and elevating skill levels requires plenty of time, however, squeezing the clock relentlessly for Sierra Madre’s volunteers.

Consider Liz Perez, a 34-year-old mother of three young boys who works as a mail carrier in Sierra Madre. One of three women in the department, she joined in 1991 and is already close to becoming one of the department’s elite engineers--qualified to drive the huge fire rigs and operate 75-foot ladders.

Late one Wednesday night, after her colleagues had gone home from field training in Sierra Madre Canyon, Perez was hard at work learning new tricks in emergency first aid. Like nearly all her colleagues, she already has an emergency medical technician 1-D license with skills in heart defibrillation. Now she is one of the first to learn how to insert lifesaving tracheal tubes.

Although many of the volunteers have permission from employers to leave work at the sound of their pagers, Perez said she can’t abandon her postal route in emergencies. But she and her husband, a Los Angeles Police Department sergeant, somehow manage to juggle work shifts and child-care duties to make possible her firefighter duties once the mail is delivered.

“There are days when I come home from the post office and I’m exhausted from delivering mail in the summer heat,” Perez said. “I’ll collapse on the couch. But when my pager goes off and there’s a medical emergency, my husband is always amazed that I’m up and out in a flash. All of a sudden, I feel the energy flowing through me.”

Perez, the Los Angeles-born daughter of immigrants from Mexico, said she has been doing volunteer work since she was in high school, when she cleaned in homes for the elderly.

“I don’t have to do this. But it’s for the community,” she said. “I like to give back what they’ve given to us. And it’s really rewarding when I can help someone I know from my mail route.”

Emergency medical calls make up the bulk of the nearly 700 alarms that sound each year in Sierra Madre, while about 50 incidents are fire-related. Structural fires are uncommon in this tree-canopied town of about 11,000 residents, usually numbering about four or five a year.

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But the firehouse is filled with the lore of big fires, such as the one that destroyed four buildings on one corner of the town’s major intersection in 1989.

That conflagration had Roger Lowe’s heart pounding. Lowe, an interior designer by trade who now serves as a deputy fire chief, took command at the scene. He nervously recalls how he had to issue urgent orders to get four men off a roof when he realized there was a good chance it would collapse.

“That’s a very common way for firemen to die,” Lowe said.

Judy Webb-Martin, a real estate broker whose office was incinerated, said the Fire Department was “wonderful.” She heard an explosion out back and ran outside, files in her arms, to find the firetrucks already at the curb. “They were there in less than two minutes,” she said.

The fire caused about $700,000 in damage but stopped short of engulfing the historic Sierra Madre Hotel, a town landmark converted into an apartment building. Still standing, the old hotel was featured prominently in the 1956 original film version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” Lowe noted.

The subculture of volunteer firefighting may subsist on the romance of heroism, but there’s also a deeper experience that doesn’t readily meet the eye. Volunteers talk quietly about a major pay-back in social capital, which evidently makes amends for the sacrifices of time spent away from their families.

Family members have access to 44 people from all walks of life, they say, a network of security to call upon in emergencies when their own firefighters are away from home on duty. These are plumbers, electricians, bookkeepers and teachers, who can be counted on to help out in most any jam.

Bill Messersmith, a quick-talking television producer who serves as president of the Sierra Madre Volunteer Firefighters Assn., recalled one time he was unavailable in a crisis. His wife was left alone to deal with an aging family dog that suddenly started having seizures. “A half-dozen guys went out on the salvage rig to help,” he said. “They gave the dog oxygen.”

The dog lived. But Messersmith’s lighthearted anecdote doesn’t tell the whole story of family stress.

“Yesterday was my wife’s birthday, but I was out of the house from 7:30 in the morning until nearly midnight, between training and meetings,” Messersmith confessed during a Saturday detail washing firetrucks. “We’re going to celebrate tomorrow night.”

The department has learned how to support home life, however, by drawing family members into the volunteer spirit rather than leaving them dangling. Wives bring sandwiches to the fire scene and meet among themselves--sometimes with the husbands of women firefighters--for informal gripe sessions. Then there are such firehouse traditions as pancake breakfasts, the Fourth of July parade and a Christmastime fireman’s ball, all community fund-raisers.

“It’s a time-consuming deal and some guys can be obsessive about it,” said Lowe, 42, the deputy fire chief who commanded the Sierra Madre crew on the first day of the Kinneloa fire as well as at the 1989 downtown fire.

“But your family has to be first priority,” said the fifth-generation Chinese American.

Lowe’s wife, Scarlett, said she has focused on raising their three children, now in college, and making peace with her role as a volunteer fireman’s wife.

“After 20 years, it’s fine now,” she said with a wrinkling of her brow. “But it was kind of rough at times. The hardest part was when the guys went out on big disasters and we’re left behind with the kids. Then you realize your husband is out there doing something worthwhile, while you’re sitting at home griping.”

There are some perks to being a volunteer firefighter. Lowe was interviewed the other day at a film location in town, where he was taking a turn at earning $22 an hour on the fire safety detail. Sierra Madre, which has a long track record hosting movie crews, rotates this lucrative moonlighting duty among its firefighters.

Even volunteers serving marathon hours on the 1993 firestorms had a rare chance at monetary reward. Like thousands of other non-career firefighters who rushed to join strike teams in Southern California, they were paid as much as $680 a day by the state.

Still, there’s no denying that volunteer firefighters are a real bargain when cities and counties in California increasingly face fiscal troubles. Sierra Madre has had to impose a 6% utilities tax and hike water rates to attack its budget deficit. The situation might have been much worse with a Fire Department payroll to meet, said Tracy, the unpaid fire chief.

The Sierra Madre city government does pay for firetrucks, equipment and operating costs out of a fire suppression budget totaling $161,000 this year. And public funds also underwrite the $89,000 for a separate city fire prevention bureau that has two paid staff positions. The town’s two ambulances and the cost of emergency medical care, however, are supported by fund raising and are free to taxpayers.

Although more and more volunteers are being replaced with career firefighters as demands increase for higher skills, Sierra Madre is a long way off from paying firefighters. Tracy said he brushed off a municipal consultant in 1993 who proposed converting to a career Fire Department at an annual cost of $3.8 million--a plan that would offer far less personnel and less equipment.

Meanwhile, people are lined up to join the Fire Department, going through a time-consuming screening that involves rigorous exams, psychological tests and a yearlong internship followed by a probationary period. About four or five firefighter wanna-bes regularly hang out at the firehouse during drills.

“A lot of the other communities in the Los Angeles area are transient in nature. They just aren’t very volunteer-oriented,” Tracy said. “But things are different in Sierra Madre.”