Conway, Wash. Fire Department Is Concerned About Lack of Volunteers

CONWAY — Conway residents recently flocked to their local fire station, enticed by the prospect of free cake and snacks and hanging out at the local firehouse.

The Feb. 19 open house was an attempt to draw new recruits to the volunteer fire crew. About 30 minutes into the event, one person signed up to learn more about volunteer fire service.

Fire District 3, which covers Conway and Cedardale, expects several of its 58 volunteers to retire or move out of the district in the next few years. With fewer people interested in being on call for emergencies with no real pay, recruitment has increasingly become a challenge.

The district’s efforts reflect a growing concern among volunteer rural fire departments throughout Skagit County and across the U.S.

With changes in people’s busier lifestyles and increasing demands on volunteer firefighters for service, joining an unpaid crew is becoming an impossible prospect for many. Volunteerism in local fire departments has dropped by more than 18 percent nationwide since 1984, according to the National Fire Protection Association. And the volunteer demographic is only growing older, with an onslaught of retirements expected by many rural departments in the near future.

Volunteer lifestyle

When someone signs up to be a volunteer firefighter in District 3, Chief John VanPelt spends an hour making sure that person has what it takes to join the crew. Perhaps the most important question VanPelt asks is, “Why?”

“Why do you wanna run out of the house Christmas morning when you’re opening presents with your kids?” VanPelt said.

Indeed, a good volunteer firefighter is “a different breed,” Fire District 13 Chief Roy Horn said.

But with many households now requiring two or three incomes to survive and kids needing rides to extracurricular activities, people are no longer willing to get out of bed in the middle of the night to answer a fire or medical call, he said.

And that shows in his numbers.

In Fire District 13, which covers the Hope Island, Swinomish and Summit Park areas, the number of volunteers has decreased by 24 percent in the past five years, while call volume has increased by 34 percent.

The district loses six to eight people per year and only brings in three to four.

An aging population makes those demands increasingly more difficult, Horn said. In fact, more than 75 percent of his district’s calls are for rescue and emergency medical services, while fires — which draw most people to service — comprise just less than 8 percent.

“Now we flow more oxygen than we flow water,” said Brett Berg, chief of the Big Lake and Clear Lake fire departments. “That’s not necessarily appealing to everybody.”

Last year, Big Lake crews responded to the same address for medical calls 49 times, Berg said. In the past two years, that total comes to 90. A lot of those were at 1 or 2 a.m.

Those demands don’t just affect the firefighter, but the volunteer’s entire family, he added.

“If you can imagine a volunteer that has to get up and go to work the next day, by the end of the week (after you answer a couple calls), you’re getting the cold shoulder at the dinner table because (your family is) as tired as you are,” he said. “You’re disrupting the family. We leave our kids’ birthdays for calls, we leave church, we leave our job.”

In addition, employers are no longer as understanding as they used to be about their workers leaving for a call.

“Now people are in fear of (losing) their jobs and they’re afraid to go,” Berg said.

That fear, and the recent recession, could explain the drop in volunteer ranks after a boost in numbers a decade ago. The number of volunteers has dropped 9 percent since 2008.

“Even the people who are actively hard workers, they don’t have the time,” said Fire District 8 Chief Rusty Feay, who oversees stations in Hickson, Punkin Center, Prairie and the surrounding areas. “They’re just trying to survive.”

Several rural fire chiefs throughout the county, including Feay, said many younger volunteers just aren’t as dedicated as they used to be. It’s more of a revolving door. And the core of their crews are older and will soon be ready to retire.

“I honestly fear for the fire service in the next 10 years, what’s going to happen,” Berg said.

Clear Lake hasn’t quite recovered since a group of its most devoted volunteers who had been in the service for 35 years retired not long ago.

“When they left it was like, ‘Wow, what do we do now?’” Berg said.

Training

When Sedro-Woolley Fire Chief Dean Klinger first joined the department as a volunteer in 1980, he was given a set of bunker gear and told which truck goes to which kind of call.

That was his training.

“I picked it up on the fly,” he said.

Now volunteer departments are held to the same state and national training standards as full-time paid departments, often with less money for the equipment and classes.

Volunteers have to meet quarterly and annual trainings and benchmarks, Feay said. And if volunteers don’t meet those on a given year, they don’t get their volunteer firefighter pension for that year.

Horn estimates that with EMT classes, hazmat training, the fire academy and other training, it could be 11 to 13 months of full training before his firefighters can be productive members of the department. And that’s all without pay, he said.

People will stop in the office and express interest after seeing a wanted sign in front of the station, Horn said. But only a fraction of those who express initial interest see it through.

“I try to be honest with them,” Horn said. “They just don’t come back because they just don’t have the time.”

Feay sees the same thing.

“A lot of those times people don’t realize what it takes,” he said.

Some fire departments, such as Sedro-Woolley and La Conner, actively draw from the Skagit Valley College Fire Protection Technology program for recruits. And many of those recruits use volunteer fire departments as a stepping stone to paid work, which contributes to the turnover.

Klinger accepts that reality in Sedro-Woolley, where firefighters often leave for full-time gigs after two or three years.

“We like to think of ourselves as the farm team,” he said. “… Our job is to make sure they’re ready to go.”

Solutions

Fire departments are taking different approaches to solving their crew shortages.

The open house in Conway, for example, was paid for by a federal FEMA grant awarded to Fire District 3 last year for recruitment and retention efforts. The department makes a presence with booths at local events and plans to host two open houses per year.

The $389,000 grant also helps the department pay for new gear and allows it to increase its per-call stipend to volunteers from $6 to $10.

Aside from recruiting volunteers, several fire districts in the west end of Skagit County are considering following the trend of forming a regional fire authority that would allow them to share personnel and resources more automatically, like districts in north Snohomish County, north Lewis County and west Thurston County, among other areas in the state.

Fire District 13 and the La Conner and Anacortes fire departments have met in quarterly meetings to explore creating a formal partnership.

La Conner Fire Chief Dan Taylor said he believes more fire districts will move in that direction.

“It’s just beginning to show its value, and I think it will continue to extend,” Taylor said.

Big Lake supplements its core of firefighters with retired people who can help with traffic control and other tasks. It also hosts an Explorer program, sponsored by the Boy Scouts of America, which allows 14- to 21-year-olds to learn many of the tasks firefighters perform and even become emergency medical technicians.

While many Explorers move on to paid jobs, others have the skills to join volunteer fire crews, Berg said.

“That’s my next fire department right there, that is the future,” he said of the kids.

Feay, whose roster has remained steady, said his department gets by with the help of the Sedro-Woolley Fire Department, which responds to certain sections of Fire District 8 from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., when District 8’s volunteers are at work.

“I can use more people, but with Sedro-Woolley, it works well,” he said.

— Reporter Lynsi Burton: 360-416-2149, [email protected], Twitter: @Lynsi_SVH, Facebook: facebook.com/byLynsiBurton