Fewer volunteer firefighters answering the call

Luckily for Hansen, it was a Saturday; most of his 11 volunteers were off work and already in town to help manage traffic at a holiday parade planned through the village that afternoon. Instead, they kept a fire from taking out more homes.

Time and again over the decades, volunteer firefighters across New Mexico and the United States, like Hansen and his crew, have dropped what they were doing — at jobs, family gatherings or holiday parties, at night, on weekends — to answer an emergency call. They battle fires, help people who are in medical or mental health crises and rescue people involved in car crashes.

The training is tougher nowadays. The calls are more frequent and involve more medical calls than fires. The volunteer firefighters are getting older, with fewer young people joining to replace them.

The scenario worries veteran first responders, especially in rural areas.

Aging out, fewer replacements

In 2018, more than 65 percent of firefighters in the United States — some 745,000 — were volunteers. In New Mexico, 78 percent of fire departments were all-volunteer and 10 percent were mostly volunteer. The number of volunteers has ebbed and increased, but the overall trend is downward.

According to the National Fire Protection Association, the decline in numbers and aging out of experienced firefighters hits hardest in fire districts that serve fewer than 2,500 people, which describes a large part of rural New Mexico.

Hansen is luckier than his counterparts in a lot of volunteer fire departments these days. He has 11 volunteers to cover a relatively small district, and their average age is 40, a decade or more younger than many volunteer firefighters in the region. He’s losing two experienced firefighters, but three new volunteers are headed to the Santa Fe County fire academy.

Still, Hansen and other volunteer fire departments worry about the future as they struggle to recruit volunteers even as the number and emotional demands of calls they respond to increase.

More than a third of volunteer firefighters were over the age of 50 in 2018, according to the National Volunteer Fire Council.

Gerard Moleski, chief of the Ocate-Ojo Feliz Fire District in Mora County, figures the average age of his volunteers is 65 years old. He’s turning 69 this month.

Mickey Richardson, chief of Sierra Bonita Fire District along the winding road through the rugged mountains between Mora and Black Lake, said his district has managed to recruit a few younger volunteers, but the average age is 60.

Most volunteer firefighters in rural New Mexico train in both structure and wildland fire. Santa Fe County has its own fire academy for both career firefighters and volunteers. Formal training for most other volunteers would require attending the fire academy in Socorro. But many fire stations handle training as they can, with veteran firefighters teaching skills. Many volunteer firefighters end up learning on the job.

“In rural areas, it is difficult. You are caught between people’s expectations and what is realistically available. And it’s kind of overwhelming,” said Herschel Wilson, a longtime volunteer with the Hondo Volunteer Fire District.

When young people do join their local volunteer fire department, some leave during the height of the wildfire season, once they are trained, to take paid seasonal firefighting gigs with the U.S. Forest Service or other agencies.

“You can’t blame them,” said David Montoya, Mora County’s fire administrator.

The training needs are more complex now, with a need for more volunteers trained in emergency medicine and responding to mental health calls.

“Last year, we had the wildfire season from hell,” said Gerard Moleski, chief of the Ocate-Ojo Feliz Fire District in Mora County. “This year, we had almost nothing in wildfires. What was different this year was the COVID calls, the medical calls, the overdose calls.”

Wilson, who has volunteered with the Hondo department since 1987 and has advanced EMT training, said “more and more of our calls are medical calls. And if [you] want to think about it as depth-of-despair calls, we are the front-line mental health workers responding to mental health calls, responding to drug overdoses, responding to attempted suicides. That’s a whole growing subset of calls. Fire academy does not train you to do that. Even if you are an EMT, you don’t get trained in that.”

Ripple effect

Emergency medical technicians and firefighters were “in short supply in rural areas and decreasing,” according to a 2018 report published by the National Fire Protection Association, which develops standards and codes, including for volunteer firefighters. In rural areas, volunteer firefighters may be the closest medical help around for miles.

That increases the pressure on volunteer fire departments to have people trained as EMTs and paramedics.

“The job gets harder and harder all the time,” said Hansen, Madrid’s fire chief. “The administrative requirements and the qualifications get harder all the time. “A lot of people can’t put the time in.”

It is an issue for volunteer firefighters at the national level, too.

“In my experience, it has become harder and harder to be a volunteer. There are a lot more calls. There is a lot more training required,” said Curtis Floyd, who started his 34-year firefighter career as a volunteer and now advises first responders globally through the U.S.-based NFPA. “We’re seeing a lot of issues around recruitment and retention of volunteers, especially in small, rural departments. And COVID has been a right hook to volunteer fire departments who struggle to keep people healthy and in service. We have had entire departments quarantined.”

As experienced volunteer firefighters retire, if no one replaces them, “we may see a spike in losses, in property loss. Insurance costs are going to skyrocket,” Floyd said. “There will be an outcry that there aren’t enough resources to handle emergencies.”

“It’s a scary thing to think about. Unfortunately, given human nature, we don’t really worry about it until it is a big issue,” Floyd added.

Many of the rural fire districts in New Mexico also encompass heavily wooded areas, including national forests, and more people moving into those areas known as the wildland-urban interface.

If volunteer firefighters aren’t available to stop small wildfires, the fires can quickly grow. As the state enters what is already a warm, dry winter, the threat of catastrophic forest fires and more property losses increases.

Staffing a fire district with an ample number of volunteers isn’t enough. They have to train in order to respond to all types of emergencies and have to show up on calls. Moleski said he has about a dozen volunteers, and five of them he can count on. “With five firetrucks, I really need 10 volunteers” to have the recommended two firefighters per vehicle, he said.

Well-equipped firetrucks will have chain saws and extricators on board to help on fires or at vehicle crashes. But volunteers have to be trained how to use them.

“The paradigm used to be, ‘Put out the fire.’ Now it’s firefighter safety,” Moleski said. “With that change, you have to have training. As chief, your personnel records are going to get pulled if there’s a death, a burnover or a shelter deployment. As chiefs, we have this huge liability that no one used to even think about because of the good Samaritan laws.”

Finding solutions

New Mexico and some local governments have taken steps to help volunteer fire departments. Volunteers reduce the need to hire and pay salaried firefighters, which saves local governments money.

Many counties will reimburse volunteer firefighters the education costs of fire and medical training. Volunteers who train and respond to a specified number of calls can earn state retirement benefits. Fire departments should promote those benefits to draw in volunteers, fire chiefs say.

In another boost to New Mexico volunteer fire departments, state lawmakers and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham this year approved a bill to make 100 percent of fire protection funds available to fire departments instead of sending any unused portion to the general fund at the end of each fiscal year.

The change makes millions of grant dollars available to fire departments for equipment, protective gear and, now, stipends for volunteers at qualifying districts. The law directs the Fire Protection Grant Council to look at “the critical needs of recruiting and retention programs for volunteer firefighters.”

The state already makes retirement benefits available to volunteer firefighters over age 55 who have at least a decade of service and who meet specific criteria.

Fire chiefs try different methods to recruit volunteers. Moleski said he waits two hours after a new person moves into his fire district before he drives a brush truck to their house and delivers a volunteer welcome packet. “I tell them if they have a fire anywhere on their property then they have to join,” he said.

Hansen said the Madrid district does a lot to let the public see what it does, and that has helped with recruitment. The fire station has a community room that other nonprofits use for meetings. Fire volunteers have also hosted naloxone (for opioid overdoses) and CPR training for the community. The district subsidizes chimney cleaning and hosts a distribution of food bags once a week in partnership with a local food bank.

“People see you out in the community, see what you do,” Hansen said. “I think it is key that you be out in the community and visible.”

Wilson, who retired this year from the Hondo department, said that to retain volunteers, fire departments need to “have a culture that volunteers want to be a part of. That’s engaging. That’s fun sometimes. That’s not hierarchical, except on a scene. A chief that respects everyone.”

Despite the challenges and demands, Wilson hopes more people will join a local volunteer fire department. “Being a volunteer firefighter will really change your life in terms of your perspective on what’s important, what’s not important, what are tragedies and what are inconveniences. It can positively change your view on life.”