This is a question I have been asked often in recent years. Now you have to understand this question is coming from an urban West Coast population base. While volunteers make up 70-75% of the firefighting force across the rest of the country, volunteers only make up 29% of the firefighters in California. Many here on the West Coast are not even aware that volunteer firefighters exist. I believe that volunteer fire departments are needed just as much now as anytime in our past.
Difference between paid firefighters and volunteer firefighters
The volunteer departments are required to maintain incident reporting systems, manage worker safety programs that meet all Cal-OSHA requirements, manage equipment maintenance and testing, maintain required licensing (medical, DMV, etc), undergo criminal background checks, participate in DMV monitoring, and undergo drug testing just as their paid counterparts do. Volunteer and career firefighters are both required to meet the same statutory training requirements before they can respond to emergencies in a full capacity. Now this is not to say that all paid firefighters and all volunteer firefighters have the exact same level of training. All firefighters receive training throughout their career (yes this is a career even for the volunteers). Some seek more training than others in both the paid and volunteer ranks. The main difference in training between paid and volunteer firefighters in San Mateo County is that the paid apparatus will have at least one trained paramedic on the responding unit providing advanced life support (ALS). The volunteer fire departments provide basic life support (BLS). Another difference is in staffing of apparatus. The paid firefighters will staff an engine with three firefighters, a ladder truck with three or four firefighters, and rescues/squads with two firefighters. Paid staffing is, in most cases, 24/7. Volunteer apparatus staffing depends on the number of firefighters available in the community at the time of the emergency. While not a high percentage, there are times when no volunteers are available. Conversely, many times the volunteers can staff multiple apparatus for a single incident or cover multiple incidents simultaneously. The volunteers routinely staff engines with (5) to (6) firefighters. In the event of multiple incidents, paid engines have other paid engines coming to cover their stations. However, this may cause long response times. It is important to understand that the cost to staff a paid single engine fire station in this county is $1.8 to $2.4 million annually, with the latter being most common. While the volunteer departments do receive some direct support from the county, the majority of volunteer fire department funding comes from community fund raising.
Response times
The national response time standard requires that fire departments arrive at 90% of the emergencies in four minutes or less. This standard is voluntary and not a requirement. Meeting this standard is problematic in the rural areas of San Mateo County and is a privilege that those residents who chose to move into these areas forfeit in many cases. The typical time for a paid engine to respond into the heart of Kings Mountain is 16 minutes. This time can be much longer. The volunteer engine may be on scene in 3-6 minutes. When staffing allows, there are often times when volunteers respond directly to a medical emergency at a neighbor’s home directly, while other volunteers respond to the station to pick up the apparatus.
The mission
Both paid and volunteer fire departments provide “all-risk” incident mitigation. This means they provide services to a wide spectrum of responses. These may include fires, medical emergencies, vehicle accidents, hazardous material spills, other hazards, and non-emergency requests from the public. Both paid and volunteer firefighters provide for life safety, property conservation, and incident stabilization. Cal Fire (through the San Mateo County Fire contract), the Woodside Fire Protection District, and the Coastside Fire Protection District (also contracted through Cal fire) are the agencies that have jurisdictional authority for the areas in and around Kings Mountain. In the event of a large scale emergency, these agencies can bring in resources from all over the county or the state. These agencies also have responsibility to provide fire prevention, enforcement, and other duties. The volunteer departments have no jurisdictional authority and work at the pleasure of chiefs of the other agencies. Kings Mountain and La Honda both work under the direction of Cal Fire. Though they serve in any capacity requested, the main goals of the volunteer fire departments are more focused. They endeavor to keep the small fires small, provide timely occupant rescue from burning structures or other hazards, provide rapid intervention and coordinate medical evacuation for life threatening medical emergencies and accident victims, and contain structure fires to the structure and thus not allowing them to become a wildland fire.
The case for maintaining a volunteer fire department
As a general fire service guideline, it is held that a fire will double in size every minute it burns. It is important to get suppression efforts in progress as soon as possible. This can keep small from getting large. Underwriters Laboratories (UL) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have been studying structure fires and presenting important data to the fire service over the past 10 years. They have recently stated that time exposure to the toxic fire environment is the leading contributor to the 3,000 civilian structure fire deaths that occur annually in the US. It is estimated that victims located and removed from a structure fire after 8 minutes have an extremely low rate of survival. Similarly, the survival times for life threatening medical emergencies require a faster response than can be provided by an engine traveling from a neighboring community. Cardiac arrest requires rapid initiation of CPR and early defibrillation. All of these are examples of incidents that require the shortest possible response time. Now having a fire response from inside the community cannot guarantee a positive outcome. However, it will at least give the victim a chance. The volunteers also provide critical local knowledge, which can improve response times or find difficult to locate places.
What do you need to maintain a strong volunteer fire department?
Obviously, you need volunteer firefighters to maintain a fire department. Throughout the country, many volunteer fire departments are struggling to recruit and retain firefighters. This is not a plea for firefighters. The firefighters are only a portion of the equation. Without a strong sense of community and strong community support, volunteer fire departments are vanishing across this state. While important, I am not speaking of financial support, nor am I making a plea for funds. It is important that this community understand we are in this together. If we do not maintain the strong sense of community that we have shown in the past, we will fail in the future. As the fire chief, I greatly appreciate the financial support of the Art Fair and the community. But if the Art Fair only made $3 this year, yet still had the same strong pulling together of the community that it has had each year since its inception, our fire department would still be stronger because of it. A president of the Cal Fire Firefighters Union was quoted in the SF Chronicle in August of last year calling volunteer firefighters a “necessary evil, so to speak.” When I started in this fire department, there were seven volunteer fire departments responding within the county. Today, there are three. The others not only lost their firefighters, they lost their sense of community.