Fire departments in Minnesota are following a nationwide trend that they'd rather not -- a steady decline in volunteers.
Bloomington Fire Department once had 155 firefighters on staff. Now, they have less than 100, Chief Ulie Seal told KARE.
Back in the early 2000’s the Bloomington Fire Department had a staff of around 155 volunteer on-call firefighters.
“Right now, we have 99 firefighters. Eight of them are full-time and seven are also career fire chiefs,” Seal said.
The department is now looking to hire 18 full-time firefighters to address this shortage and they’re using $6.2M SAFER grant to get them started.
He added that several departments across the Twin Cities metro also applied for the grant money, including the Hopkins Fire Department.
"We're all kind of having the same problem,” Hopkins Fire Chief Dale Specken says. “Years ago, we would put applications out and we would get anywhere between 50 and 60 applicants. This last go around we had nine of them.”
Specken's also a board member with the Minnesota State Fire Chiefs Association. He says this isn’t just a problem in the Twin Cities metro, but nearly every department in Minnesota is struggling to find firefighters.
"You're starting to see a lot of departments shift away from volunteers,” Specken says. “So many departments are shifting to more full-time staff.”
Many other fire departments across the country are in the same situation.
According to a 2020 survey from the National Fire Protection Association, 65% of the nation's firefighters are volunteers, around 677,000 of them.
That number's 6% lower than it was in 2019, and many chiefs believe that drop has only gotten worse since the pandemic.
“It has really escalated in recent years,” Chief Seal says.
It's why many departments are shifting to full time as fast as they can, and why many chiefs are worried.
"Because I'm struggling to get enough people to handle the small house fire. I still get trucks showing up with one or two people on it and then I'm plugging chiefs in or bringing crews together to make a crew, to be effective on that small house fire,” Chief Seal told the reporter.
