Fire! Volunteer?

[txdon]

Any Volunteer Firefighters in rural areas find themselves alone? Today was one of those days. I was in the county and could respond to the VFD page.
I was the only one.
35 minutes after being dispatch I arrived on location it was comforting to see the mutual aid was available and responded from the next town and was in my FD truck rear view mirror as I pulled in the gate. A resident fighting the grass fire with a shovel was recruited to squirt water. This time it was only a grass fire and the next town's mutual aid was available.
It still has me thinking about the what ifs.

 

[KennethBrown]

Been a vol ff for several years but have never been availeable when paged out. Working for the SO I was the first on the scene of lots of fires. The FD's would show up and I was out in the middle of it beating away.

 

[WTA]

I was a volunteer once. Would probably never do it again for exactly the reason you are talking about. I responded to all of my pages! I lost count of how many times I was the only one. I was fairly experienced as a navy firefighter and went to all the schools and was in charge of repair parties and hose teams whenever we had fires aboard ship. It was a lot easier putting the fire out with a little help.
I really hate dragging a 2 1/2 inch hose around by myself!

I'm my own firefighter here. Our volunteer department is always unavailable. Or passed out drunk from what I hear. I set up all of my own firefighting equipment around the house and shop and will just take care of fires on my own. Hopefully I will never have to though. We have had one small electrical fire in a breaker box but that was easy and no real damage was done. I got lucky.

 

[grnspot110]

I spent 29 years (now retired) on a small paid department in a rural area. We always had to depend on vol. in & out of town. When a rural department was set up several years ago the city firmen no longer responded to rural calls except mutual aid. Over the years the "new" wore off the rural dept. & fewer members would respond until a District was started, then things improved.

Part of the problem small businesses can't afford to let thier employees loose to respond and the bigger employers usually 'won't'. There also seems to be a lack of personal responsibility in this day & age, "let sombody else do it" (not just in the Fire Service).

I'm afraid this will get to be a bigger problem as time goes by!~~grnspot110

 

[Robert_in_NY]

I live in a farming community and most of the firemen are local farmers so when I fell it didn't take long for them to arrive. The funny thing was the first guy on scene was from an emergency squad 15-20 miles away. He was running a delivery truck for a lumber yard and was near us when the call went out.

They have a good system here, from the initial call they dispatched the emergency department from both local towns as I was in both territories and they dispatched the helicopter at the same time because of the distance I fell. By the time they had me on the board the helicopter was coming in to land. I know it felt like an eternity while I was laid out on the ground but it really wasn't that long.

I am thankful for the Volunteers who serve our community as well as all the volunteers across our country.

 

[RobertN]

I have volunteered locally since '99. Worked part time for a little while at first.

Within the local area, there is pretty fast reponse by a mix of paid and volunteer firefighters. The majority of Station in our area, both my district and the surrounding district, are staffed full time. In my position, we staff a second out engine if our staffed engine goes out.

If our staffed engine goes out on a fire or accident in our diestrict, we will staff a second engine and respond. If it is out of our district, we will staff, and respond if dispatch requests, or cover our district.

I've been on engines and water tenders where we moved and covered stations in other disrtict, because the whole area was stripped of engines.

I don't leave work for a call, partly because I am so far away. And, my pager does not work inside the building I work at. My manager knows though, and if something big comes up, I'll go. A bunch of us volunteers do the old fashioned phone tree to see who is gonna make in after a page goes out...

Although it is very hard for some small businesses to lose folks off to a fire, and some big ones don't like it either, there are state and federal mandates that protect volunteer firefighters and volunteer medics.

I have been asked to go on Southern Cal strike teams, but have not had the opportunity due to work constraints. I want to though. Some of our crews have been in the middle of some big fires.

for response times, there are some outlying area's not too far from us, where the people have some long response times. There are just not that many people out there, and no engine's nearby.

It is hard now days to find volunteers. Our academy starts in a couple weeks. It is a couple nights a week for six months, 2 months of saturdays doing manipulative drills, and then additional time in your home station doing training specific to the engine you'll respond on. This, is on top of minimum First Responder medical certifications(will probably be minimum EMT soon). That's a lot of training commitment before you even get on an engine.

 

[tommu56]

I was a volunteer for about 25 years and was the chief engineer for about 15 (in charge of the trucks repairs and operation).
After 2- 3 nighs a week for those years I just got burnt out and passed the baton on to the younger guys .

tom

 

[Rara Avis]

Been in the game since 1979...started as a vollie with Bethesda-Chevy Chase and am now with Williston FD and am now Paid-Call...Currently, we finally have 4 paid full timers who are divided up over the 24x7 week...along with a new sleep-over program which is supplemented by our 2 Technical College students living in the station so the first truck out on all fire/med calls has at least 4 people...so the response to the station is a bit more relaxed these days...

But there have been calls in the past that could have been exciting, if not for our common dispatch system and excellent automatic mutual aid dispatching for certain calls...

 

[MossRoad]

To all of you who give or yourself....

Our volunteers where I live are outstanding. So are the paid people. We are very fortunate to have people like you that care. Thanks.

 

[dooleysm]

Around here when a call goes out it is answered by a bunch of guys of all different ages. It seems like everyone is a volunteer firefighter around us. I work about 35 miles from home, so I'm not a volunteer, but I sure appreciate what these guys do. They take it seriously, but I know they have alot of fun with it too.