WA Firefighter Reflects on 50 Years of Service

When Ron Swanson started in 1967 as a volunteer firefighter with the former Whatcom County Fire District 2, the Geneva fire hall was a garage that held two aging pumpers and a loft where the guys would meet.

Homes didn’t have smoke alarms, only a handful of Americans knew CPR, and defibrillators to shock a dying heart weren’t portable and easy to use.

Few firefighters had first aid training anyway, because America’s emergency medical system was still in its infancy.

The nation’s first 911 call was placed a year after Swanson started, but it wasn’t used in Whatcom County until a year or so later.

District 2 alarms were dispatched to volunteers by land-line telephone to one of the firefighters’ wives, who started a “phone tree” to alert others.

Volunteer firefighting back then was truly neighbors helping neighbors.

“What better way to get in the community and get to know people and help people,” Swanson told The Bellingham Herald during an interview at the current Geneva station east of Bellingham. “It’s been rewarding.”

Swanson, 82, who retired last month after 51 years as a firefighter, also served as volunteer fire chief and later as an elected commissioner of District 2, which is now part of South Whatcom Fire Authority.

He’s seen remarkable changes in the fire service over the past five decades as advances in gear, tools, apparatus, training and tactics have helped firefighters save more lives and put out fires more efficiently.

Nationwide, the number of fire calls for 1968 is unavailable but total fire calls decreased 68 percent from 1968 to 1980, even as the population increased 43 percent, according to the National Fire Protection Association.

Changes in firefighting

When Swanson started, volunteer firefighters rarely went inside a burning house to fight the flames, he said.

“We laid hose and that’s about all we could do,” he said. “Other than that, it was just stand in the front door and spray water as far as you could. We didn’t have the equipment like we do today.”

Civilian CPR training had just begun in the late 1960s, defibrillators weighed 150 pounds and smoke alarms — which were invented in 1965 and cut the risk of dying in a fire by half — weren’t easily available until Sears started selling them in 1980.

It was 1989 before the National Fire Protection Association required builders to install smoke alarms in new homes.

“I never saw a smoke alarm in anything when I started,” Swanson said.

Firefighting costs increase

“When fire districts 50 years ago were first started, they didn’t have a lot of money and most of their revenues were done through fundraisers,” said Chief Dave Ralston of South Whatcom Fire Authority. “The (original) Geneva Fire Station was built by the volunteers with material donations by many of the community members.”

South Whatcom’s new Geneva firehouse, now called Station 21, opened in May 2001 at a construction cost of $1.175 million.

Increased funding is required for fire departments large and small because of the greater complexity of equipment, demands on training and the rising number of calls for service.

In 1967, new fire engines sold for much less than $100,000 — about $722,000 in today’s dollars.

In 2018, South Whatcom bought three new engines for $637,000 each, part of a bond issue approved by voters, Ralston said.

Smoke alarms save lives

The reduction in fires reported today is partly because of a nationwide focus on fire prevention after the blistering 1973 report “America Burning,” which helped spur federal, state and local action that resulted in greater use of smoke alarms and also prompted new building codes and changes in construction that limit fire spread.

“There are fewer fires but when there is a home fire, because of the types of materials used today in furniture, carpets and in building construction, they cause items to burn quicker, hotter and release toxic gases,” Ralston said. “This is why it is so important to have working smoke alarms in your home and test them monthly.”

Smoke alarms alerted residents in 53 percent of fires from 2009 to 2013, the National Fire Protection Association reports. Three-fifths of U.S. fire deaths were in homes without a working smoke alarm.

Ralston remembered at least two fires within the past 15 years where smoke alarms likely saved the lives of residents who were sleeping, including a 2004 fire that damaged a home in Sudden Valley.

“The owner stated she was awakened by a smoke alarm in her bedroom on the third floor of the home,” Ralston said. “She called 911, grabbed one of her dogs, went downstairs to exit the house and noticed heavy smoke and fire coming from the den next to the stairway. She closed the door to the den and exited the building. These couple of actions saved her life.”

Emergency medical care

With fewer fires to fight, firefighters now provide emergency medical care and take patients to the hospital. They work at car wrecks and perform rescues in confined spaces, on steep slopes and in the water.

In 1967, few firefighters — paid or volunteer — had any medical skills, Swanson said.

“With medical calls in those days, we just hoped that they could be gotten to the hospital as quick as possible,” he said. “The medical situation didn’t exist here. If someone was fortunate enough to have maybe a (Labor & Industries) first aid class or were in Boy Scouts, they might’ve had some first aid. And that was primarily all the first aid anybody had here at that time.”

Like most volunteer firefighters, Swanson held a full-time job elsewhere. He was a pharmacist and worked at several local drug stores — including Costco, where he retired last year.

Former District 2 volunteer firefighter Rob Wilson, who’s now division chief of communications with the Bellingham Fire Department, said Swanson’s medical knowledge gave his crew an edge with patient care.

“He was so important to the fire department at that time” because he could read a patient’s prescription bottles and know their underlying diseases or conditions, Wilson said in a telephone interview. “We were fairly new to the medical services and during Ron’s tenure, with his pharmacology experience — he just had that knowledge of pharmacy. It gave us a real advantage.”

Equipment advances

Today’s firefighters have “bunker gear” that protects them from extreme heat. A scuba-like mask and air tank keep them from breathing the toxic smoke of modern fires.

That equipment allows them to haul hoses inside a building to attack a fire and search for potential victims, saving lives and property.

But those SCBAs — what firefighters call their self-contained breathing apparatus — are expensive and weren’t in wide use until the 1970s, even for some big-city fire departments.

“In comparison with today, it was a very crude situation. The equipment wasn’t there, but you did your best,” Swanson said.

“You crawled inside as far as you could, otherwise it was ‘surround and drown’,” he said, meaning that firefighters sprayed water from outside the house.

“The SCBA, the breathing apparatus, certainly made it easier,” he said.

Department changes

Ralston said South Whatcom Fire now has a career fire staff of 10, including two administrative fire officers and eight full-time firefighters, 14 part-time firefighters and 50 volunteers.

In 1967, Swanson and other District 2 firefighters answered 12 calls in Geneva, Swanson said.

Sudden Valley was added to the District 2 response area in the 1970s, and District 2 joined South Whatcom Fire Authority in 2009, along with volunteer fire districts serving Chuckanut, Lake Samish and Yew Street Road.

As the district has grown, so have the number of calls for service. In 2018, South Whatcom Fire was dispatched to 1,047 alarms, but about 85 percent of those were medical-related, Ralston said.

The fire authority’s 2019 budget is $2.66 million, compared with $9,175 for District 2 in 1970, Ralston said. That 1970 budget of $9,175 translates to $66,000 in 2019 dollars.

When Swanson became a firefighter, women didn’t ride the engines, but they were part of the department’s fundraising auxiliary.

New York City’s fire department hired its first women after a lawsuit in 1982 but 37 years later only 4.5 percent of firefighters nationwide are women, according to 2016 statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor.

District 2 and South Whatcom have had many women volunteer firefighters over the years, and South Whatcom Fire recently hired its first woman to a career fire position.

Firefighter training

Back in Swanson’s day, in-house training was limited to handling the back-pressure of a fire hose that sprays 175-250 gallons of water per minute.

Now, it costs South Whatcom about $10,000 to train and outfit a single firefighter, Ralston said.

That includes $2,500 for a Firefighter 1 academy and $2,000 for emergency medical technician certification.

Their firefighting gear costs about $3,000 and then there’s another $2,500 for uniforms, pagers and radios.

With the demands on training and for other reasons, the number of volunteer firefighters is dropping.

That puts Swanson’s 51 years of service far above the statewide average of about 25 years, said Hailey Blankenship, executive secretary at the state Board for Volunteer Firefighters.

“Wow, that’s impressive!” she said in a phone interview. “It varies a lot across the state. I would definitely say that’s an exception. It’s well beyond the average but not unheard of.”

Many volunteer firefighters these days use the service as a way to get training and experience on their way to a career fire job.

But for Swanson, firefighting remained about family and community. His son was a longtime volunteer firefighter, as was his son-in-law, who’s now a career fire investigator.

“It’s an opportunity to be part of the community, to give back and to help others,” Swanson said. “I went in with the idea of learning all these things, but I was able to help others. My goal is still to help others.”

___ (c)2019 The Bellingham Herald (Bellingham, Wash.) Visit The Bellingham Herald (Bellingham, Wash.) at www.bellinghamherald.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.