Eric McIntosh still has vivid memories of a particularly nasty

fire that he fought 20 years ago. It was inside a country store in the coastal town of

Half Moon Bay, California. It was the hottest fire then in. My helmet melted and I remember cans just exploding,

the canned foods and thinking, man,

what is happening in here, just everywhere?

It sounded like a war zone in there. We actually pulled people

out pretty early in that fire because there was a collapse and then it became a defensive fire so at that point it's setting up

our big water cannons that put out a thousand gallons a minute. The fire raged on for

four hours and it took nearly a hundred firefighters and 25 trucks and

engines to put it out. The entire two-story structure eventually burned to the ground.

It left nothing but the charred remnants of canned goods and cowboy boots.

But thanks to Macintosh and his fellow firefighters, no one was hurt.

And despite the heat and the danger, McIntosh says there's something he loved about the experience.

The adrenaline's rolling, your training that you've worked so hard for, you were able to put into play, you know, you hate to say it, but you feel great.

But then, of course, the adrenaline fades and just exhaustion.

This is the storybook version of firefighting, brave

heroes battling infernos and saving lives. In reality, feats like that are

increasingly rare. Thanks to safety regulations and new technologies, there are fewer

fires than ever. But the number of salaried firefighters keeps growing. And that has a lot to do with the changing nature of the job.

Overall, fire departments are busier than ever, but the distribution of call types has changed.

So whereas fire incidents fell by more than 40% in three decades, the volume of EMS responses exploded by nearly 250%.

For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things.

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