When filmmaker Justin Tyler was putting together a documentary about volunteer fire departments in central New York State while at Ithaca College, he was stunned at the challenges those firefighters face on a daily basis.
“Ithaca is the only paid fire department in the entire Finger Lakes region, and everything else surrounding them is a volunteer department, which to us was crazy,” Tyler told WETM-TV.
With "The Slow Burn: A Volunteers Call to Duty," the mini-documentary he made as a class project with two other producers, Tyler hopes to spread the word about what volunteer firefighters do in New York, as well as around the country. He's tried to do that by letting volunteers share their stories and experiences in their own words.
In the documentary, Speedsville Fire Lt. Alix Gresov discusses how personal tragedy pushed her to become a firefighter. When she was 16, her friend died in a fire, an experience she wanted to prevent for others.
“That was the first time I kind of decided I want to join up and make sure that that doesn’t happen, or do my best to make sure that doesn’t happen again to anyone else,” Gresov says in the movie.
Creating the documentary also gave Tyler a better understanding of a first-hand experience he had years ago. His house caught on fire while he was living in Long Island in 2013,
“I was very bitter for a long time about how the fire department didn’t respond fast enough," he told WETM.
He later discovered that the responding firefighters at the time had been volunteers, and he had a greater respect for what that entailed after creating the documentary.
“People had to come from their homes, then get ready, and then come out to the fire," he sad.
Given more time to work on the documentary, Tyler said he would've liked to explore
“I would have gone deeper into what handcuffs volunteer departments because it’s not a commitment issue," he told WETM. "The people who are there want to be there and are trying to save lives and are as committed to saving lives as anybody who gets paid to be a firefighter. They are exactly the same people. They are going for the exact same goals, but when it’s a volunteer department, there are just so many more hurdles to jump that it’s becoming, honestly, a crisis."
