Volunteer Firefighters

This project explores the lives of volunteer firefighters in the Velsky district of the Arkhangelsk region — a vast rural area where a significant number of settlements remain without professional emergency services due to large distances.Villages are scattered among forests, far from one another. Most buildings are made of wood, heating is stove-based, and mobile coverage is absent in many places. Fires are not uncommon here. When something happens, help often has nowhere to come from. Response time is determined not by regulations, but by distance, road conditions, and chance. Local residents have begun to address this problem on their own.

The protagonists of this project are volunteer firefighters. They are farmers, drivers, workers — “ordinary village guys, ” as their coordinator Andrey Zorin describes them. They have no stable income, no proper equipment, and no social guarantees. Nevertheless, they are the first to arrive at fires, accidents, or search operations. They leave work, step away from family gatherings, wake up in the middle of the night and go to extinguish fires — because there is no other option. In the Velsky district, which covers 10,000 sq. km, there are 13 volunteer fire brigades.

The project focuses on the fragile boundary between civic initiative and the absence of a system. Volunteerism here is not a choice, but a necessity born out of infrastructural gaps. As an author, I am interested in the moment when a person decides to take responsibility for their surrounding environment — not as an act of heroism, but as something self-evident. I find it important to highlight such stories, because they often become a condition for survival in remote areas and the only real way to improve the quality of life there.