Josef Hock stubs out his cigarette, languidly lights another and eyes the television screen across the room playing a Madonna music video. Nearby, three other men sit and smoke as they nurse coffees and thumb through magazines.

"We tend to be a bit rough around the edges," says Hock, gesturing to his companions from where he sits at a pub-style wooden table, as though apologizing for them.

It's 9 a.m. on a Friday morning and the firefighters of the C shift at Prague's central fire station in Prague 2 are waiting for something to happen. For the next 22 hours they'll be on duty: Shifts last from 7 a.m. to 7 a.m., with a two-day break in between each.

Being a fireman, of course, means being ready to spring into action at any minute: A typical day can change with the sound of an alarm.

The first months of 2006 have been busy for firefighters like Hock and his team. Countrywide, firefighters responded to 9,505 calls in January alone, 47 percent more than in January 2005. The number of those calls that have been deadly fires is also higher than last year. Fires have claimed 38 lives so far in 2006, compared to 21 in the first three months of 2005, a statistic that spawned investigations into building safety, especially in Prague.

Still, fires represent only a fraction of the calls to which firefighters respond. In 2005, according to fire department statistics, firefighters were called to 96,833 incidents, 19,484 of which were fires.

On this particular morning at Prague's central station, the calls are not fire-related, save one: A truck had caught fire on a winding road just outside Prague. The station's investigative unit rolled out to the scene to photograph it and write a report.

From volunteer to pro

Like many of his colleagues, Hock, 33, began his career as a volunteer firefighter, and although he is married and has two children, he still puts in at least 20 hours a week volunteering for his local fire department in addition to his professional firefighting in Prague.

He says he can't imagine doing anything else. "I guess I just have it in my blood. If I was doing something other than this I'd be bored."

Volunteer firemen have an important place in Czech history. Until World War II, most towns relied primarily on local volunteer fire brigades.

According to Josef Orgoník, spokesman for the Volunteer Firemen's Association, the country's 323,499 volunteers helped out in 31,966 incidents in 2004, the last year for which the association has statistics. On average, professional firefighters assist in 100,000 incidents each year.

The ranks of professional firefighters have grown in recent years.

There are 9,260 professional firefighters at work in the Czech Republic (compared to 45,013 police officers). The Interior Ministry is responsible for the professional brigade. Every region in the country has its own fire department, divided into several stations. In Prague, for example, there are 11 stations corresponding to the city's 11 districts.

Firefighters here make a monthly salary of about 28,000 Kč ($1,180), about 9,000 Kč more than the average wage.

Explaining deaths

Any call, of course, could be potentially dangerous no matter if it's a professional or volunteer firefighter responding to it.

But the men at Prague's central station do not choose to talk about these perils.

They also do not see an obvious explanation for why more people have died in fires this year.

Two of the most recent fires in Prague — including one in Zličín March 14 that killed three people — happened in temporary residential housing, which has prompted the prevention section of the fire department to inspect these types of buildings throughout the city.

So far, firemen have inspected 51, and of those, only four fulfilled the fire safety regulations. The biggest problems included blocked emergency exits.

Investigators say that if windows at the residence in Strojírenská street where the March 14 fire happened had not been barred, people might not have died.

But fire department officials say this year's high number of fire-related fatalities, while unfortunate, doesn't seem to be indicative of an increasing trend.

Petr Kopáček, spokesman for the fire department at the Interior Ministry, says the long, hard winter is partly to blame for the increase in deaths. "The rising energy prices mean a lot of people are burning wood and coal this winter," he says. With these types of fuel people need to take special precautions to avoid a fire, he says.

Battling icicles

And the cold weather has brought a slew of other problems as well that Hock and his colleagues have had to deal with in recent weeks. On the morning at Prague's central station, one call to remove ice from the roofs of buildings follows another.

"More bloody icicles," says Jan Borůvka, one of the men on shift that day. "It was exactly the same thing as before, only a different address."

The men are annoyed because technically, keeping a roof ice-free is the responsibility of the building's owner.

On some days this month, firemen had to ride out as many as 88 times to remove ice from the roofs of buildings, notes Oldřich Klegr, commander of that day's shift at Prague's central fire station. "The building owners have gotten used to us doing this job for them," he says.