Volunteer shortages a worry for fire departments across county
MIDDLESEX TWP — The Adams Area Fire District’s roster lists approximately 75 names in total, but despite the on-paper numbers, the department — like many others across the state and country — faces a shortage of volunteers.
“The biggest time that we see (shortages) is Monday through Friday when everyone is at work,” Chief Tim Llewellyn said. “There are days when there is one firefighter in the whole entire community, and there are days when there are no firefighters in the whole entire community. And that’s the sad, scary part.”
Llewellyn describes the department’s membership as “robust,” but says that numbers tend to vary at the large fire station along Route 228.
“We have several classes of membership, and we may not see all of those people in a month,” he said. “They may only come for a little bit. We have a lot of people who volunteer with us who live in other communities.”
While Adams is managing now, Llewellyn fears the day that “something bad” happens when not enough firefighters are around during daytime hours.
“The big accidents, the garbage truck into the building (last Friday), happened when a lot of people were around. Had that happened in the middle of the day, the response would have been very different,” he said. “There would have been a lot less people there to do the job.”
Most of Butler County’s fire departments are staffed by volunteers who also have full-time jobs during the day. The volunteer model is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain, Llewellyn said.
“We’ve always been a volunteer department. I think in previous years, there may have been more individuals who were shift workers, and we don’t see a lot of that anymore of people who are willing to do the volunteering,” he said. “The solution is not necessarily to me more volunteers, because how much is too much for volunteers?”
Middlesex Township Volunteer Fire Company has also struggled to field volunteer firefighters and members in recent years. While the department has bounced back somewhat in recent months, going from eight or nine active firefighters to 18 after a recent membership drive, the future still looks uncertain to chief Walt Hamilton.
“With most family members working, and children and jobs, people just don’t have time,” Hamilton said. “I guess the best way I can say it is there’s people out there who are hiring who can’t even get employees; how are we supposed to get volunteers?”
Volunteering as a firefighter at various levels can require increasing levels of training and work, including multiple training classes per week, he said. However, not all volunteers have to be the ones running into burning buildings, and roles like fire police exist for varying schedules and levels of experience.
“If anybody can donate any type of time, the fire company can use them,” said Hamilton. “Even if it is two hours here and two hours there, we don’t know when calls are coming in.”
Fires themselves have gotten more difficult to manage over time, explained Scott Garing, chief at Harmony Fire District.
“Back in (the ’80s,) the ’90s, and early 2000s you were having what we would call “legacy" type construction, where fires didn’t burn as fast,” Garing said. “In modern day fire conditions, fires are burning tremendously faster. You used to have 30 minutes to get out of your house. You now have five, and that’s a situation we all have to face. To get a response to you in five minutes, you have to be staffed to do that. Modern fire conditions are basically dictating that we need to modernize our organizations and have people here 24 hours a day to respond.”
Staffing a station 24 hours a day is a difficult task for a volunteer department, and factors continue to add up into a perfect storm of challenges for firefighters, Garing said.
“Everybody's lives are busier than they ever have been, and the fire departments are busier than they ever have been, and the requirements are more than they ever have been,” he said. “It’s continued to increase and get worse. You have to get creative.”
Combining fire stations or working together can be one option to address shortages. Both Harmony Fire District and Adams Area Fire District originally grew from combining two fire stations into one. The Zelienople and Harmony fire stations joined to become the Harmony Fire District, and similarly, the Mars and Adams fire stations joined to become Adams Area.
“They were struggling with a lot of funding issues, and they figured that it would be better to kind of pool their resources and do it together rather than separately,” Llewellyn said of Adams and Mars. “That was several years of work to determine feasibility, look at debt, look at income, look at assets, and make sure it was worth it.”
The idea of paying firefighters and the stretched limits of a volunteer system both occupy Llewellyn’s mind.
“When I started doing this as a 14-year-old kid in 1989, my department ran about 100 calls a year. It was a small community, but when you come to bigger communities like Adams or Cranberry, and they’re running 800 or 900 calls a year, how much is too much for volunteers?” he said. “Yes, there's a crisis of volunteers, but do we need to rely upon volunteers? I think the big overwhelming answer is no.”
The Butler City Bureau of Fire is the only paid, professional full-time department in the county, and has been a professional department for over 100 years.
Chief Christopher Switala said at least four firefighters are in the station at all times. Entry-level firefighters make around $40,000 a year, and top-level firefighters make in the mid-$60,000’s.
Even with paid members, staffing at the station isn’t perfect, Switala said.
“There has still been a difficultly in recruiting for career positions as well. It’s not just limited to the volunteer firefighters,” he said. “It’s not actually just the fires service. Police, fire and EMS have all had a decline in applicants in recent years. When I first started in the fire service, it was typical for hundreds of applicants to apply for one or two jobs. Now, it’s a very small fraction of that.”
Firefighters with the Butler City Bureau of Fire are required to live within Butler County itself, which somewhat limits the pool for some of the part-time positions at the station, he said.
“You have to be already certified as a firefighter and you have to have your EMT certification to be able to apply,” he said. “That limits our applicant pool to even apply for the job, because a lot of people who already have those might be working somewhere else already.”
The station currently has 19 full-time firefighters and one part-time firefighter.
“Because we have a minimum crew on duty 24 hours a day, it’s not panic mode, but you can only do so many tasks with four people on duty,” Switala said. “When we have a working fire, it requires calling in the off-duty personnel as well to respond, and it also requires calling in some of the volunteer companies that surround us to assist, because four personnel just doesn’t cut it. The national standards call for a minimum of close to 20 firefighters responding on a first alarm.”
The plight of volunteer departments weighs on Switala, too. He predicts that more departments will need to merge in the future to continue serving the region.
“It’s going to eventually hit a breaking point that’s going to require a regional approach to things,” he said. “Each individual municipality is not going to be able to fund or staff the fire department on their own, and they’re going to need to start regionalizing their approach to it. It’s also going to involve a mixture of increasing some of the paid positions to fill in those gaps that are no longer being filled by the volunteers, due to declining volunteerism.”
Hamilton admits that he isn’t sure where the Middlesex company will be in five years.
“It’s hard for people right now to volunteer for anything. I’m sure that the fire departments aren’t the only ones,” he said. “Volunteer firefighting has carried this state, and has saved this state billions of dollars, and now, it’s just a fading thing. I don’t know if our state really cares.”
He also expects that departments may need to consider merging, closing or paying firefighters to deal with shortages.
“What I see happening is either people are going to have to give it up, or they’re going to have to merge, or have to make a county fire department that’s paid,” he said. “That’s where it’s coming to. The next step for these departments is either to close or be a paid-volunteer combination.”
