For two years I was on call with our volunteer fire brigade. The alarm could come at any hour, and when it did, you dropped whatever you were doing and drove to the station. Around fifty times a year I left a meal, a conversation or my bed that way, and I never once asked myself what I was leaving behind. A call meant a burning shed, a car in a ditch or someone who had fallen at home, and while we dealt with it, the rest of the village carried on exactly as before.
This year I have been thinking about that question a lot, because its answer depends entirely on the size of the event.
A system built on people who live nearby
Germany protects itself with volunteers to a degree most people never notice. Just over a million people serve in the volunteer fire brigades, which is 96 percent of all municipal firefighters in the country. The federal office for civil protection estimates that about 1.76 million people volunteer in civil and disaster protection overall, across the fire brigades, the THW and relief organizations like the Red Cross.
The principle behind the system is proximity. Trained people are spread across every town and village, they live among the people they protect, and they are alerted individually, so for an everyday emergency, help is minutes away. It is an excellent design for the incidents that make up almost all of the work, and anyone who has watched a village brigade turn out on a Sunday afternoon knows how well it runs.
What changes with scale
The same design behaves differently as an event grows. A forest fire or a river flooding its banks draws in brigades from the neighboring towns, then from the whole district, then from further away, and the command has to hold enough units back to keep the rest of the region covered while half its crews are elsewhere. That is still the system working as intended, only harder.
Now picture something larger: a tenth of Munich without power and water for several days, about 150,000 people. At that scale the emergency is everywhere at once, and every trained person in the region is needed at the same moment. Volunteer firefighters report to their stations, off-duty professionals are called back in, nurses and doctors head to the hospitals, THW crews go to the pumps and generators, and the grid operator’s technicians go to the grid. Each of them goes where their skills do the most good, which is exactly the right decision for the system as a whole.
From the perspective of a single street, the same decision looks different. The people who would know what to do are, by design, the ones with somewhere else to be. In a village that is the neighbor with the pager; in the city it is the off-duty paramedic on the second floor and the nurse across the road. The larger the event, the more reliably the most capable people on any street are the first to leave it, and the longer it lasts, the longer the street is on its own.
What the snow showed
Bavaria has a recent example of what that looks like. In January 2019, heavy snow followed by rain and frost put five districts in southern Upper Bavaria into a declared disaster. Roofs carried up to 500 kilograms of snow per square meter, villages were cut off, and the ambulance service regularly missed its statutory response times. The Red Cross interviewed the people involved afterwards and published what it learned.
Much of it is encouraging. Neighbors cleared each other’s roofs and lent each other snow blowers, and people who needed somewhere to go mostly stayed with friends and family. One interviewee credited the region itself, where people still know each other, and added that in an anonymous apartment block it would have been far harder. Another finding is the sentence that has stayed with me since I first read the report: “You often don’t know who in the neighborhood needs help.” Driveways to houses where someone depended on care sometimes stayed buried, because nobody on the street knew. Among the Red Cross’s own conclusions was a call for ways to strengthen self-help and neighborly help, focused on the people who need it most.
And that was rural Upper Bavaria, where people still know each other. A city of anonymous apartment blocks like Munich starts from much further back.
The layer that stays
So the question worth asking about any street is who stays. My answer is residents who stay put in a large emergency and know what to do, and I think of it in three steps. First, look after yourself, so that you stay out of the casualty count. Then look after your household, so that it gets through the first days without calling for help, because every call it avoids frees a responder for someone with no other option. The federal office still teaches this with the Münsterland in 2005, when about 250,000 people spent days without power, and its own conclusion was that very few households had any food or water stored. The third step is the one the rest exists for: know the people next door, and know which of them will need you.
A few trained people per street are enough for this. When the Los Angeles Fire Department began training residents in 1985, in what became the CERT program across the United States, the lesson that held was that a small trained core multiplies itself in a real event by organizing everyone else. Large emergencies reliably bring out an enormous willingness to help. What turns that willingness into help is someone on the street who knows what to do with it.
The fire brigades, the THW and the relief organizations remain the backbone of all of this, and I say that as someone who spent two years in one. They do their best work when the streets they leave behind can hold on their own for the first few days. When I was on call, I never wondered who was left on my street after I drove off. Now it is most of what I think about.