Local volunteer fire departments struggling to find volunteers

Volunteer fire departments across the state have been struggling to keep numbers us existing members are aging and new members are few and far between.

The Washington Fire Department is staffed 24/7 with at least one fireman on duty at all times and has a full roster of 36 members with four, including the chief, being full time. Washington Fire Chief Tom Wide said keeping numbers up is tricky, due to a variety of factors.

'Over the past several years its been tougher and tougher getting people involved here ... a lot of it is demand on fireman, the amount of time they need for training, they have to keep up the training, and time restraints are a lot of it, but yeah it's getting harder and harder to find volunteers,” he said.

Drew Schumacher, Mt. Pleasant Fire Chief, said he has similar staffing problems but on a much smaller scale. The Mt. Pleasant Fire Department has no full time staffers and a roster of 20 volunteers and three reserves, members who have yet to complete all the fire training required by the state of Iowa.

Schumacher said the ideal number of firefighters would be 26 and 10 reserves, but due to similar issues of time constraint and despite there being no full time positions on the squad, he has been unable to reach those numbers.

'We live in a world today where both parents work and it's a time management thing when you have kids, a house, work, you know, and then the add-in (of) a volunteer job that's virtually 24/7, seven days a week, you know, it puts a real strain on things and most people don't want to add to their already complex life,” he said.

To qualify to be a firefighter in the state of Iowa, one must pass Firefighter 1 training and in most local fire departments, also pass a background check, physical and have their application approved. Another struggle with finding qualified members is finding those young and able to do the job.

Brighton Fire Chief Bill Farmer said as the members of the department age, they are always looking for younger people to fill in the gaps but it is becoming difficult because of the demanding nature of the job. Chief Farmer said the department has a roster of 20 but can have up to 24. Being a rural department, they handled 40 fires in 2018, compared to 230 calls in Mt. Pleasant, 130 in Washington and 300 in Fairfield.

The Fairfield Fire Department has a unique feature none of the other departments have which is their new medical response team. The department has four full time firefighters, three full time drivers who are also EMTs and 15 volunteers, five of which are trained EMTs. Last year, in their first year as a squad, the department responded to 1,006 medical calls.

'It's definetly a younger guys game with all that's involved,” said Fairfield Fire Chie Scott Vaughan, explaining the job is essentially 24/7. Chief Vaughan said he has been with the department for 25 years and the one common thing he sees are that lives are getting busier and because of that, volunteers are harder to find.

The Washington Fire Department also has six volunteers with a medical background, but because the Washington County Ambulance Service operates in town, they are not the primary first responders for medical calls. Instead, the six trained members serve as backup to calls when needed. The Mt. Pleasant Fire Department also has trained EMTs within the department but they also only assist the ambulance if needed.

For firefighting, the Fairfield department uses what they call the swarm method. All the gear is on the truck and if a call is in the city, volunteers get to the site and get dressed on scene, with a response time of about 3-4 minutes.

For a call in the county, the response time is about 10-15 minutes in which the volunteers respond to the station, dress there and head out. Only six go on that call and the rest wait at the station for them to return and stay in case there is another fire in the city or they need backup. Similar response times were reported in Washington and Mt. Pleasant.

Overall, each chief agreed the difficulty in finding volunteers all came down to the time commitment, with Farmer saying this is a problem for every volunteer department across the state. Anyone wishing to learn more and volunteer on any local department is encouraged to stop in and pick up an application or call the station with any questions.