Did You Know LAFD Started Out as a Volunteer Department?

Did You Know LAFD Started Out as a Volunteer Department?

Most people who live in LA assume the city’s fire protection has always looked the way it does today: paid professionals, full-time stations, a massive budget and fleet behind it. It’s an easy assumption to make. But the Los Angeles Fire Department didn’t start out that way at all.

For nearly two decades in the mid-1800s, LA’s fire service was entirely volunteer-run. The first organized company showed up in 1871, when local county clerk George M. Fall put together a volunteer crew known as Engine Company No. 1. For the next 15 years, it was volunteers — not paid firefighters — who protected the growing pueblo of Los Angeles. At its peak, the all-volunteer department had roughly 380 members on the rolls. They bought their own equipment, ran their own fundraisers, and showed up because they wanted to, not because it was a job.

It wasn’t until February 1, 1886 that the city started paying its firefighters, officially marking the birth of LAFD as we know it today. A lot of the men who became the first paid firefighters were the same volunteers who’d already been doing the work for over a decade.

So in a real sense, LA’s entire fire service tradition was built on volunteers first.

Most People Don’t Know That Tradition Never Fully Went Away

Here’s the part that surprises people even more: volunteer firefighting didn’t disappear from LA when the city went professional. It just moved to where the career agencies have the least bandwidth — the wildland-urban interface, the canyons, the brush-covered hillsides that ring the basin.

That’s where we come in.

Southern California Wildfire Response (SCWR) is a volunteer fire department based out of the Santa Monica Mountains. We started in 2021, founded by a handful of trained firefighters who saw real gaps in wildfire coverage and response across LA County and decided to do something about it instead of just talking about it.

Like that original 1871 crew, nobody on our roster gets paid. Every member is here because they want to be, after going through training. We operate in compliance with California’s fire department framework, running a hand crew and several Type 6 brush engines across wildland-urban interface (WUI) areas and higher-risk terrain throughout LA County. Our members have responded to a number of the major fires you’ve probably heard about in the news, plus a long list of smaller incidents that never make headlines.

We also partner with regional land conservancies, supporting fire prevention and response work across tens of thousands of acres of open space in the region.

What We Don’t Do Is Just as Important as What We Do

We’re not trying to be LAFD or CAL FIRE, and we’re not interested in competing with them. Our lane is wildland, WUI, and all-hazard support — brush response, still alarms in fire-prone canyon terrain, and the kind of coverage that’s easy to overlook until fire season ramps up and resources get stretched thin. We don’t perform interior structural firefighting. That’s not what we’re built for.

What we are built for is showing up, trained and ready, in the places where an extra set of hands makes a real difference.

The Through Line

It’s a strange thing to realize that the city now home to one of the largest, most well-resourced fire departments in the country got its start because a few hundred people decided to volunteer their time to keep their neighbors safe. That instinct didn’t disappear — it just found a new home in the wildland spaces that career agencies can’t always reach fast enough.

We think that’s worth knowing. And if you’re someone who’s ever wondered what it would take to be part of that tradition, we’d love to hear from you.

—

Southern California Wildfire Response (SCWR) is a 501(c)(3) volunteer wildland fire and all-hazard emergency response nonprofit based in the San Fernando Valley / Los Angeles area.