Where’s the fire?

Volunteer firefighting challenges create risk

It’s been a couple of years. Washington County Justice of the Peace and longtime volunteer firefighter Willie Leming, as he successfully pitched a plan to buy new, self-contained breathing equipment for volunteer fire departments, made a dire prediction.

“Volunteerism is going away,” he told his fellow Quorum Court members. “Washington County, you better get ready. Within 10 years, you’re going to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars to pay these people because volunteers can’t volunteer no more. They’re having to work. Before it was grand- ma and grandpa on farms, and they got up and done a lot of work for a lot of people for nothing. And that’s what us volun- teers do every day. I’ve done it for 40 years.”

This isn’t a problem just for volunteer fire departments. Volunteerism in general has declined in recent years nationally. A survey by the U.S. Census Bureau and Americorps found formal volunteerism — the kind involving longer-term commitments — dropped 7% between 2019 and 2021. Some theorize people still volunteer, but do it through one-time or short-term opportunities, preserving flexibility in their schedules.

But a shortage of volunteerism in emergency services affects their abilities to protect property and save lives.

We don’t know if Leming’s forecast of spending hundreds of millions of dollars will be realized, but he’s right about at least a couple of points. First, volunteer firefighters deserve everyone’s appreciation for the time and energy they put into serving their neighbors as first responders. They do a dangerous job, sometimes with vehicles and equipment used and repaired and used some more until parts are no longer available or until they suffer irreparable failure. They use a lot of Band-Aids in their work, on patients and on equipment.

Secondly, population growth, residential development extending more into rural areas and the changing nature of life in rural communities increase the need for trained firefighters, ready to drop what they’re doing at a moment’s notice. Simultaneously, changes in work habits and people’s busy personal schedules make it harder to find people willing or able to make the commitment necessary for part-time firefighting.

In a Democrat-Gazette story last week, local firefighters lamented the challenges of recruitment. The pandemic had an impact, as it did with nearly every aspect of our lives, but one firefighter said even existing volunteers emerged from the experience valuing their time with family even more and less likely to make themselves available as much for calls.

Residents more often work outside their rural communities that need firefighting volunteers. If there’s a fire in, say, Prairie Grove, and a firefighter works at Walmart’s headquarters in Bentonville, he can’t get to the scene fast enough. Others are professional firefighters in larger cities, willing to serve when they’re back home, but unable to respond when they’re working their full-time roles.

So what are the volunteer departments doing? With a shortage of volunteers, the departments do what individual firefighters do when they’re responding to car wrecks, health emergencies and forest or building fires: They rely on each other.

Fire departments have long had mutual aid agreements, pledging to respond to each other’s fire districts when requested to back up their colleagues. But as the population, traffic and housing developments grow in rural areas, that approach has risks. It’s hard to cover multiple emergencies, so when departments are forced more often to back each other up, it can leave them out of position to respond within their own districts. Traffic congestion is a problem, too, even for people with sirens.

More firefighters would mean more capacity. As volunteers within each community are harder to attract, some fire officials say the day might come when an entire county could be brought under a single fire district to counteract the local manpower issues.

Local, quite simply, matters. It matters in terms of reaction time, knowledge of geography and proximity of equipment. The best fire department and firefighters to respond to any incident are the closest ones.

This is not a new phenomenon. We remember a panel discussion in 2014 in Rogers in which officials called for more volunteers and recognized it takes a certain passion for the job to put up with the interruptions it means for their lives. In other coverage of the newspaper through the years, fire department leaders have lamented the growing “me only” attitudes of society in which people are less inclined to share their time. Community involvement, they say, is crucial for neighbors and for the individuals who step up.

Arkansas isn’t alone, if there’s any solace in that. Search the internet and it’s easy to see departments throughout the nation are trying to attract new members: Connecticut, Maine, New Mexico, Illinois, North Carolina … probably every state in the Union.

What are the solutions? Promoting the need and growing awareness, some say. In Illinois earlier this year, legislators approved a law that gives volunteer firefighters up to a $500 credit toward their annual state income tax obligations. Few if any volunteers do it for the occasional financial benefit, but it doesn’t hurt when people feel their time and commitment is valued.

Other ideas include development of health and fitness programs as a benefit to the volunteer and, naturally, to the department; tuition reimbursements to help younger people with their pursuits of education; the addition of public safety or fire academies in local or vocational schools; and marketing campaigns.

Back when Leming made his comments, we reached out to the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management to see if there was any statewide effort to help solve the local challenges of volunteer fire departments. To our surprise, we were told the state helps to find grants for local departments, but had no one focused on recruitment and retention issues for volunteer departments.

It seems to us if something like tourism, for example, attracts state government’s attention, the health of the state’s network of volunteer departments ought to as well. When local departments’ capacities to fight fires and respond to other emergencies are diminished, that’s a problem for the state as well as for the local communities.

Volunteer fire departments are local, local, local. That should certainly be preserved. But the strength of emergency services statewide is critical enough that state leadership should be involved in finding solutions. Local departments are clearly stretched thin. Their time is consumed by training, being prepared to respond and in actually responding to emergencies.

Perhaps through state leadership, some solutions can be found to help bolster recruitment and retention of volunteer firefighters. Is there any such leadership in state government?

Is this a crisis? Well, the house may not be on fire yet, but it’s never a good idea to wait until it is before you get prepared.