Three firefighters teamed up at Oak Ridge's Station 1 last week to form the department's first all-female crew, a lineup the city says left a permanent mark on its history. The trio, Ariel Lathan, Sandra Sila-Massengill and Emily Ash, worked the shift together under a temporary scheduling change that brought them under one roof.
A Milestone Shift Born From a Schedule Swap
According to the City of Oak Ridge Government, the department reported that it had its first all-female firefighting crew working together at Station 1 the previous week. The post credited the temporary scheduling change with bringing Lathan, Sila-Massengill and Ash together for the shift, and the department said the three firefighters left a permanent mark on department history. The post was met with a simple burst of applause emoji from commenters online.
Oak Ridge's fire department isn't a small outfit. The city operates four fire stations with eight response apparatus and runs three personnel shifts on a 24-on/48-off schedule, having responded to 4,132 calls for service in 2022, per oakridgetn.gov.
Part of a Broader, Slow-Moving Shift in the Fire Service
Oak Ridge's moment echoes similar milestones elsewhere. An Erlanger, Kentucky, fire station was staffed by an all-female crew for the first time in its history, according to fox19.com, though that outlet noted the Erlanger firefighters were together on overtime rather than serving as a regular crew. In Montana, Smith Valley Fire Department Chief Amy Beick described an all-women volunteer shift as a first in her two decades at the department, telling FireRescue1 it was “a volunteer shift made up entirely of women.” Beick also said women make up half of the department's 14-person roster.
Women remain a small share of the profession nationally, though the exact figures vary by source. FOX19 cited a report saying women made up 9% of the fire service in 2020, while FireRescue1 cited National Fire Protection Association figures putting women at 11% of volunteer firefighters and 5% of career firefighters that same year. An NFPA table, however, lists women's share of career firefighters in 2020 at 4.4% rather than 5%, a discrepancy the dossier does not reconcile.
A more recent FireRescue1 article, published in October 2024, said women still account for about 4% of career firefighters and 11% of volunteers, up from 3.7% of career firefighters 25 years earlier. That piece estimated around 15,000 women serving as career firefighters nationwide and another 78,000 serving as volunteers. Separately, the organization Women in the Fire Service reported 5,855 female firefighters and officers in career-level structural firefighting positions in its current data, and estimated the true figure at roughly 6,150 after accounting for women it says are missing from its dataset.
Against that backdrop, a single shift at one Tennessee station might look small. But for the department, it was enough to mark the occasion publicly and celebrate Lathan, Sila-Massengill and Ash by name for the first-of-its-kind lineup at Station 1.
