KINGWOOD, W.Va. -- "The little guys finally won one," Jim Oldaker, president of the West Virginia State Firemen's Association, said Wednesday.
Oldaker was speaking of a decision by the state Fire Commission to withdraw its proposed changes to the state fire code that volunteer and paid firefighters said they could not afford.
"They voted to withdraw the fire code for this code cycle and over the course of the year do a rewrite on it and involve the stakeholders in producing something that won't have as many objections," he said.
State Fire Marshal Sterling Lewis Jr. confirmed the Fire Commission "voted to pull the rule and work on it for future consideration."
Corky Thomas, chief of the Kingwood Volunteer Fire Department, said, "They knew they bit off more than they could chew. I'm glad that common sense prevailed."
Among the changes that won't be added to state fire code this year are age restrictions on emergency responders, increased training requirements and additional personnel. The proposed changes also called for fines for officers of volunteer companies if the requirements weren't met.
"We're very pleased they withdrew the fire code," Oldaker said. "There was just no way we could comply with this. There were rules we could not afford or reasonably comply with. It would have created a situation where we could just not agree to take on that massive amount of personal liability, no matter how devoted we are to our communities."
Fire Commission member Ted Shriver, who chairs its Code and Regulatory Committee, said the purpose of the Fire Code is "the protection of life and property from hazards of fire and not to dictate or mandate for firefighters."
While working on training rules for volunteer fire departments that were requested by the Legislature, the commission "got caught up in training rules and decided to delete exclusions from the fire code," he said. After public hearings on the code, the committee thought it could restore the exclusion, but could not. "We decided the training rule was more important and we didn't want to jeopardize the fire code. The easiest, best way to fix it was to withdraw it."
Copyright 2012 - The Dominion Post, Morgantown, W.Va.
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
