Baker has 15 volunteers, and he and his team respond to around 150 calls per year. They’ve already taken on 107 this year, he said.

The team is self-dispatched — Baker listens to the departments’ radios and determines when his team should go.

“We haven’t missed a second-alarm fire,” Baker said. He said he and his volunteers respond to 80 percent of “working fires,” and will sometimes go even if it’s something minor.

The organization, a nonprofit, got its name from how the state is broken up into fire districts — District 5 covers all of the North Shore, including Peabody, Danvers, Beverly and Salem, to Cape Ann.

It has five vehicles, including two buses and an old ambulance, Baker said. They’re stored in Peabody.

When a home or building is on fire, getting to it as quickly as possible is always a firefighter's goal.

Tulsa Fire Chief Ray Driskell says the ideal response time for firefighters is six minutes or less. His department reaches that goal about 87 percent of the time, but he says that's not good enough.

One recommendation from the Center for Public Safety Management study is to reduce the response time in east Tulsa, something the chief says is already being addressed with plans to build a new station.

Driskell said, "There's several neighborhoods out there that have developed over the recent years, and we're not responding to them like we are the rest of the city and we need to fix that. That doesn't need to stay the same."

The fire chief says the immediate priority for the department is to build a station in east Tulsa. It will be paid for in part by Vision money, but it's unclear when construction will begin.

But, there are other recommendations - like hiring civilians as fire marshals and inspectors - that might need a little more discussion with city leaders.

"If you've been a fireman, you've been on a firetruck - you know a lot more about fire behavior, you know a lot more about what a fire is gonna do on a structure and what the codes mean to us. So, I can see a big benefit to having the fire marshals having firefighting experience over a civilian," Captain Jerry Gibbens said.

Mayor Dewey Bartlett said the study also focused on the medical calls the department performs as part of the city's emergency medical services. Findings include a recommendation to form two-person squads to respond to medical calls while keeping fire engines available for fire calls.