public high school was just two hundred yards away. The intermediate school was also nearby, as was the West Rest Haven nursing home, the West Assisted Living Facility, an emergency medical service station, and a 22-unit housing complex called the West Terrace Apartments. And just across the railroad tracks, also in the shadow of the plant, lay an entire neighborhood, whose residents were now coming out of their homes to take a look at the growing blaze. 

Sprinting toward the flames, Wines could see how treacherous the fire looked.  Extinguishing it might take all night and could require the help of a few neighboring departments, but he figured he and his fellow firefighters would get it done. Nearby, Sharon Hlavenka and her daughters Raven and Hannah stepped out in front of their house, watching the fire twist like a yellow-and-black tornado above the two blocks of houses in their view. On the bottom floor of the West Terrace Apartments, college student Erica Smith heard the fire truck sirens as she sat at her dining table, studying for a final exam while her six-year-old hunted around the apartment for toys. A few blocks away, Jean Maler had just gotten home from supper at the Czech-American Restaurant, and she wandered out to her backyard to see the fire’s sparks popping out of the gray smoke. Two of her sons, David and Kevin, were second-generation West volunteer firemen, and she knew they were likely on their way to the plant if they weren’t already there. They’d spray down the building and put out the flames, the way they always did. 

There are 1,501 volunteer fire departments in Texas, which means that 78 percent of the state’s firefighting forces are made up of men and women who are willing to drop whatever they’re doing and risk their lives for no compensation. For these volunteers—shopkeepers, salespeople, farmhands, mechanics—firefighting isn’t so much a passion as an obligation, one that interrupts their meetings, deals, projects, and conversations, adding a bit of chaos to their routines. Broadly speaking, anyone who lives in a town with a population smaller than 15,000, where municipal coffers are often too limited to fund a professional force, understands this. There are no shifts at the firehouse. There’s no one champing at the bit, no one waiting for that call to come in so the guys can jump in the truck and get to work. Yet the reward for volunteer firefighters, as anyone in the West department could tell you, is the simple satisfaction of protecting their community. No one else is going to put out the grass fire by the side of the road or hose down a neighbor’s house. So they do it. 

In West, a prospective volunteer must wait for an opening in the department before he can apply. Even then, he is not automatically enlisted. Members vote on whether an applicant fits the force’s needs (specific qualifications such as proximity to the fire station matter greatly), and if he is selected, the new recruit must then undergo training: a week of fire school at Texas A&M, perhaps, or regional instruction on the use of air packs, trucks, and hoses. If he wants to get certified, as almost half the West firefighters are, he’ll continue to take classes. He must also attend the department’s monthly business meetings and drills, which consist of reviewing the plans of attack at area schools, local businesses, or the town’s hotel. Only after a new firefighter  shows a firm grasp of the process may he assist in a real emergency. 

The West Volunteer Fire Department answers about one hundred calls a year, and except for the department’s annual barbecue cook-off, designed to raise a few thousand dollars for classes and equipment, the firefighters go about this work with little fanfare. Theirs is a quiet commitment: at the time of the blaze at the fertilizer plant, West’s firemen had served an average of 10 years each; the two most veteran members, George Nors Sr. and 51-year-old funeral director Robby Payne, had both served for almost 30 years. The members of the force had all grown to rely on one another, especially when they were faced with unpredictable situations. After Robert Snokhous had had to pull a teenager he knew from a fatal car wreck, for instance, he’d turned to Payne for guidance in the grief-stricken days that followed. “Just how am I supposed to continue to do this?” he’d asked.

They were connected in other ways too. Joey Pustejovsky, the city secretary, talked every day with Tommy Muska, the mayor, as well as Stevie Vanek, the mayor pro tem, who happened to be an old classmate of Muska’s. Other firefighters were related by marriage or by blood—the Snokhous brothers were cousins with the one female firefighter, Judy Knapek, and George Nors Jr. served alongside his father—while still others had grown up together or now attended the same church or lived within spitting distance of one another. Payne, for one, had married David Maler’s cousin and regularly played golf with Kirk Wines and Muska, who was also his neighbor. And back in 2005, when Muska’s teenage son, Nick, was killed in a horrible automobile accident, it was Payne who’d handled the funeral.

Robby Payne in the chapel at the Aderhold Funeral Home. Portrait by Sarah Wilson. 

Such tangled bonds are a fact of small-town life anywhere, and in West, where neighbors have known one another for so many generations that they can tell you which families tend to serve in the fire department, these connections were a special point of pride. Here, people saw one another at the drug store, at weekend picnics, at baseball games, and, more likely than not, at mass at St. Mary’s Church of the Assumption, which boasted 1,500 parishioners. And, of course, there was Westfest, the town’s annual celebration of all things Czech, when residents reveled in their shared heritage with an abundance of sausage and kolaches and where local girls donned traditional