LOUISA -- Louisa County residents might not realize it, but local firefighters' ability to respond to emergencies has been stretching thin in recent years.

The county named its first countywide fire chief last night to oversee the planned addition of four paid firefighters to help the ranks of volunteers who sometimes must respond far from the firehouse to blazes.

The new chief, Robert Dubé 52, had been a deputy fire chief in Clearwater, Fla., and previously served 28 years with the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department, leaving as a captain.

Volunteers have yet to respond to the scene of an emergency with more work than they can handle, but they have come close in recent years, said Stewart Cameron, chief of the Mineral Volunteer Fire Department.

"We've had calls where there was a very limited amount of people," Cameron said. "Luckily, the call was of a nature that the people who showed up could handle it."

Mineral is one of seven independent, all-volunteer fire companies throughout Louisa that are home bases for about 190 firefighters. But Mineral's and the town of Louisa's districts include about 80 percent of the rural county's structures and more than half of the county's 31,000 residents.

As the county's population grew by a fifth from 2000 to 2006, more emergency calls were coming in while volunteer numbers were declining, said Mike Schlemmer, emergency-services coordinator.

Many of the county's volunteers work in the Charlottesville, Richmond and Fredericksburg areas and were not available to dash to the firehouse to respond to a Louisa County fire.

"There were times where you might show up with one person on a truck or two people on a truck," Cameron said.

To make sure enough people arrived at fires, the county and volunteers decided to increase the number of crews from other firehouses responding to incidents.

Four years ago, Cameron and Robert Perkins, chief of the Louisa Volunteer Fire Department, approached the county about supplementing the volunteer staff with paid workers.

With the number of available volunteers declining, the calls were putting too much strain on too few firefighters, Perkins said.

"The same people have to run all the calls, and they don't have any backup," said Perkins, 80, who has been a volunteer firefighter for 60 years. He has been chief of the Louisa company for 32 years. "It burns your people out when they have to run all the calls."

The county hired salaried emergency medical technicians, who now staff volunteer firehouses and assist with emergency response by releasing firefighters from lifesaving duty. But their call volume has gone up, too, said Tom Runnett of the Mineral fire company.

"That's reduced their availability to us because they're out on more EMT calls," Runnett said.

One of the first things the new fire chief will need to do when he starts next month is assess personnel needs, Schlemmer said.

Mixing paid firefighters with volunteers is not as easy as it sounds. The cultures and working rules are different and sometimes can spawn rivalries.

Paid workers might have to take orders from a volunteer chief who does not sign their paychecks. Since volunteers are independent, they feel free to take chances in fires, whereas paid firefighters have to be mindful of workplace-safety regulations, said Brandon Groome, a volunteer at Mineral.

"Volunteers will sometimes venture out of the safety zones, and that's something that career staff can't do," said Groome, who is familiar with the differences because his day job is as a paid firefighter in Spotsylvania County.

The Board of Supervisors authorized the positions to be hired this year. Board member Richard Havasy, who is the panel's liaison to the fire and rescue workers, said some friction could result from the change.

"With paid people, we're going to have some turf battles, and there are going to have to be rules of cooperation for both sides," Havasy said. "Right now, we're seeing the full cooperation of the volunteers. They're looking at the public's needs first."

Schlemmer has witnessed this before. He was a volunteer in Chesterfield County in the 1970s when call volume began to overcome the number and dedication of the volunteer firefighters. Their transition to paid staff came with operational policy changes but still went smoothly, he said.

"We had to sit down with the staff and establish the ground rules," said Schlemmer, who has been in his position for nine years. "It goes back to the common ground of, 'Who are we here for?' It's the community. It's the people here."