community
june21
2018
3
Lack of Fire Volunteers Becoming Critical
continued from front page
so we had to call for those additional
resources, which obviously takes
time. Banks and Mist are our closest
resources and they’re both about the
same distance away, which is about 30
minutes. There would have been much
more damage if our one firefighter had
not responded.”
This, in essence, is the crucial
issue facing our local fire department.
With only a handful of certified fire-
fighters, the duty officer can never be
sure who, or how many firefighters,
will respond in the event of a fire, or if
someday no one will respond.
Smith says that last year he
did a review of the four most recent
fires that VRFPD responded to. “The
National Fire Protection Association
(NFPA) recommends that fire engine
doesn’t roll with less than three people,
because in fire service, ‘one means
none,’ in other words, we don’t do any-
thing alone - it’s a buddy system. If we
had followed NFPA recommendations
on those four previous fires, and this
last one, we would not have had any re-
sponse.”
“On this most recent fire, the
family did lose property, and that is
obviously not good” says Chief Smith.
“But we can also look at the positives –
no lives were lost, and everything that
was lost is replaceable.”
Currently VRFPD has two paid
personnel, Chief Smith and Captain
Steinweg. In addition to responding to
emergency calls, both have other re-
sponsibilities; Chief Smith has numer-
ous administrative duties and Captain
Steinweg is responsible for training
the volunteers. VRFPD has just 15 to-
tal volunteers, but only seven of those
are trained as firefighters and certified
to operate the specialized equipment;
the VRFPD does have two new recruits
who are currently training to become
firefighters, but that training can take
up to a year to complete, usually lon-
ger depending on the recruit’s avail-
ability for training. The remaining vol-
unteers are part of a logistics unit that
can help with tasks around the fire sta-
tion and some of them are certified to
drive emergency vehicles and run wa-
ter pumps, but that’s it. Chief Smith,
Captain Steinweg, and two Lieutenants
are the only officers in the department,
and act as duty officers - one of them
is always on duty, 24 hours a day, so
someone is assigned to respond to an
emergency call. They depend on vol-
unteers to round out a crew in the event
of a fire or rescue operation.
“One of the key issues is that I
don’t think the community realizes how
thinly spread out we really are,” says
Steinweg.
One big misconception about
the VRFPD is that many community
members don’t understand that the
Fire District and the ambulance service
are two separate entities. Metro West
Ambulance, a private for hire compa-
ny, currently provides the Emergency
Medical Services (EMS) response in
Vernonia. Metro West furnishes two
ambulances and a full time, 24 hour
Paramedic, along with a daytime Emer-
gency Medical Technician (EMT) dur-
ing the week. The Vernonia Volunteer
Ambulance Association provides a vol-
unteer to partner with the Metro West
Paramedic during evening and weekend
shifts. Several of those medical volun-
teers also volunteer with the VRFPD.
VRFPD is dispatched to all
medical calls with the VRFPD duty of-
ficer always responding, along with any
available volunteers, in order to provide
additional personnel to assist the med-
ics.
“When someone calls 9-1-1 we
always show up, 100% of the time,”
says Steinweg. “About 80 to 90%
of our calls are medical so we show
up with an ambulance and I think the
community thinks those Metro West
ambulances are part of Vernonia Fire.
Metro West has a paramedic here 24/7,
weekends, holidays, everyday. Verno-
nia Fire, with the exception of the Chief
and myself, is strictly volunteers. It
seems like the community thinks things
are fine here, but we’re struggling for
volunteers. When we have a fire, we
don’t know how many firefighters we’ll
have responding. It’s really a roll of the
dice.”
“It used to be that VRFPD
would respond with a rescue unit with
two or three volunteers to any medical
calls or accidents,” adds Chief Smith.
“Now we just don’t have the personnel,
so it’s usually just the duty officer.”
Smith says the number of calls
that VRFPD responds to continues to
increase year after year. We’re at that
point where it’s really hard for this en-
tity to respond to 600 calls a year, with-
out more paid people, or more volun-
teers,” says Smith.
Volunteerism is down across
all sectors of community groups and
schools. “People have families, more
people have jobs, or more than one
job. People have long commutes,” says
Steinweg. “We get that.”
Fire departments have the add-
ed hurdle of rigorous and time consum-
ing training requirements and standards
that volunteers must meet and maintain.
“Because of the safety issues we face as
firefighters, and because of accidents in-
volving firefighters, they’ve increased
the number of hours of training you
need before you can go out and fight a
live fire incident,” says Steinweg.
Smith adds that household
materials – furniture, carpeting, cloth-
ing, computers and televisions – are all
more likely to be made of plastic and
other synthetic materials, rather than
natural materials, making a fire scene
more toxic and dangerous for firefight-
ers. “The fires burn so fast now, that by
the time we show up a structure fire can
be fully involved and unsafe for us to
enter or go onto the roof. We’ve had to
change our tactics in the last 20 years or
so, because the fuel load in a structure,
and its flammability, keeps increasing.
Added danger requires more training.
Our volunteers have to have the same
training as professional fire fighters get-
ting paid $60,000 to $70,000 a year. ”
Not only are the training hour
requirements prohibitive for some
potential volunteers, but a lack of ad-
equate training facilities also makes
training burdensome. Steinweg says his
volunteers often team up with volun-
teers from Mist-Birkenfeld for training
Publisher and Managing Editor
Scott Laird
503-367-0098
scott@vernoniasvoice.com
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