Will Wood: Firefighters can only answer the call with your help
When you think of firefighters, you probably imagine them driving by in large vehicles with lights and sirens or directing traffic around an incident or maybe crowding around a building talking on radios and climbing ladders with hoses and heavy tools.
But the truth is that most of the times you have actually seen a firefighter, they were fixing someone’s air conditioner, teaching a class, plowing your street, practicing law, delivering the mail, or doing some other job that looks nothing like fighting a fire.
That’s because in Pennsylvania, more than 90% of all fire companies are staffed entirely by volunteers. These men and women have a wide variety of day jobs — often working for very understanding employers — and spend a large share of their non-work hours doing a second job for their communities.
Firefighters are also pretty rare. Just one in every 430 Pennsylvanians is a member of a firehouse. That’s a huge drop from one in every 40 in the 1970s. Facing a 90% reduction in volunteers, many firehouses have had to close, consolidate, or respond to emergencies short-staffed.
On average, volunteers in this part of Pennsylvania spend more than 250 hours a year training. That’s more than five hours per week — more than six work-weeks per year — taking classes, drilling on fighting fires, training to provide basic life support, learning how to cut open cars, taking courses on hazardous materials, practicing rescue swimming and how to operate boats in flood conditions.
A lot of those hours — probably more than half — are focused on training firefighters how not to become a victim themselves during an emergency situation.
None of that includes taking emergency calls. In my area, companies respond to between 500 and 600 calls per year. Malfunctioning elevators, faulty carbon-monoxide detectors, burning food, young children accidentally locked in a car or house, downed trees, assisting ambulances, these types of calls feature heavily in the responses, and are treated with the same haste and urgency as a building fire.
At a national level, 45% of the calls come in during traditional work hours. Remember the part about very understanding employers? The firefighter arriving at an emergency probably just ran out of their day job, drove across town, threw on their fire gear (something they have trained to do in under a minute) and jumped on a truck a second or two before it pulled out of the fire house.
Calls that come in outside the hours of 9 and 5 are not much easier to staff. My son has been a volunteer firefighter for over two years. I have watched him leap up from the dinner table, heard him stumble out of bed in the middle of the night, and seen him dash out the door with hair still wet from a half-completed shower.
These volunteers also look after their fire house and their equipment. They routinely check all the tools they carry and the air bottles they rely on, they wash everything, from the gear they wear to the trucks they ride in, and they fix the things they can.
A fire company — just like any other company — has bills to pay, a budget to balance, policies to update, maintenance of the firehouse and all the equipment to schedule and track, and records to keep. Administering the fire company also falls to volunteers, and many fire companies are fortunate to have volunteers who devote their time to the office work.
While all the hours that are put into the typical fire company are volunteer — saving Pennsylvania’s taxpayers billions of dollars every year — the classes they take, the equipment they operate, the buildings they use, the gas, the electricity, the water, the insurance, these things all cost money.
It is amazing that we rely on a system of volunteers to help us in our darkest hours. It is even more amazing is that this system works, but fire companies need your support. When you see a firefighter standing at the corner with a bucket raising money, or you see a raffle, car wash, or other community event at the local fire house, or you receive a fundraising letter in the mail, the people who are asking are volunteers and every penny you give will be spent maintaining their ability to serve you and your community, so please, give them your support. We’re all counting on them.
Will Wood is a small business owner, veteran, and half-decent runner. He lives, works, and write in West Chester.
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