Kansas is disproportionately reliant on volunteer firefighters. There are 499 departments across the state, 90% of them volunteer or mostly volunteer. Among the 50 states, Kansas ranks 17th for the proportion of fire service provided by all-volunteer or mostly volunteer firefighters. But Kansas fire officials say finding new volunteers to sustain that service is increasingly difficult.
by Joel Mathis/ The Journal
Way back in 1963, as he tells it, Steve Hirsch’s father traveled farm to farm in the rural areas surrounding Simpson, Kansas, to gather signatures in support of a rural fire district. He got the support of all but one of his neighbors, and the fire service was born.
Hirsch was just 1 year old.
“They wouldn’t let me put out fires for a while,” he says today.
That didn’t stop Hirsch. Today he’s an attorney by trade, but his passion is firefighting. He’s the training officer for Sheridan County Fire District No. 1 – an all-volunteer fire department – as well as treasurer for the Kansas State Firefighters Association and chair of the National Volunteer Fire Council.
There are plenty of incidents needing the fire department’s attention in Sheridan County, in northwest Kansas. “No. 1 is gonna be field grass fires, pasture fires, outdoor wildland,” he says. The department gets about 70 calls a year.
The bigger job, though, might be ensuring there is a next generation of volunteer firefighters – in Sheridan County, in Kansas and nationally.
“Without a doubt one of the most serious challenges that we face in the volunteer fire service is retaining our firefighters and recruiting new ones,” he wrote in a January article for Fire & Safety Journal Americas.
Sheridan County is actually doing OK by that standard. The fire department has 100 volunteers, Hirsch says, serving a county with fewer than 2,500 residents.
“We have lots and lots of young people – good solid young people – who want to do for their communities what I wanted to do when I was younger, and that’s help out their neighbors when their neighbors were having the worst possible day,” he says.
Across Kansas and nationally, the story is different. Volunteer fire departments – a staple of rural America – are struggling to find volunteers.
When the National Fire Protection Association started its tracking in 1984, there were nearly 900,000 volunteer firefighters serving across the United States. In 2020, the most recent year for which there is comparable data, that number had dipped to 676,900.
Comparable numbers for Kansas are difficult to come by.
But the state is disproportionately reliant on volunteer firefighters. According to the National Fire Department Registry summary, there are 499 departments across the state – 78.6% are volunteer departments, and another 11.4% rate as “mostly volunteer” departments. Among the 50 states, Kansas ranks 17th for the proportion of fire service provided by all-volunteer or mostly volunteer departments.
Kansas fire officials say finding new volunteers to sustain that service is increasingly difficult. Fewer young people are joining up.
“It’s worse than I’ve ever seen it,” says Chad Russell, chief of Andover Fire and Rescue and president of the Kansas State Association of Fire Chiefs. “And I’ve been doing this for more than 35 years.”
If the trend continues, experts say, fire protection in rural areas of Kansas – more than 95% of the state – will be much more difficult to come by. That could mean lost lives and lost property in parts of the state already struggling to survive, potentially millions of dollars and community hopes up in smoke.
‘Community, pride and giving back’
Russel Stukey started his firefighting career in high school as a volunteer in Waverly, Kansas. It was different then, he says.
“My dad was a volunteer, so I started going to meetings with my dad,” he says. “I mean, heck, when I was in grade school, I just enjoyed it and a sense of community, pride and giving back.”
These days, Stukey is the chief of Riley County Fire District No. 1, which covers the entire county outside of the city of Manhattan. In addition to Stuckey, there are two deputies and an administrative assistant on the payroll.
Everybody else – roughly 130 volunteers spread out among 15 stations at outposts in places like Randolph (population 159) and Ogden (closer to 1,600) – is a volunteer. Those are folks who get pulled away from “kids’ ball games, birthday parties, the whole nine yards” to go serve their neighbors, Stukey says, in emergencies including “structure fires, grass fires, auto-extrication, basic first aid medical response in conjunction with the county ambulance service.”
He would like the number of volunteers in his department to be closer to 180. “We are not staffed nearly as well as we would like,” he says.
One problem? There simply isn’t as big a pool of potential volunteers in rural Kansas.
“The majority of volunteers at that time were ag producers, farmers, ranchers,” he says of his Waverly days. “Not that there weren’t guys from town. There absolutely were. But your biggest pool of labor was from the farmers in the area. And as farms have gotten bigger, there’s fewer farmers and smaller families.”
In that sense, then, the challenges besetting volunteer fire departments are an extension of longstanding demographic problems facing rural Kansas. Most of the state’s smaller counties are losing population, making it more difficult to draw teachers, lawyers, doctors and other professionals to small towns.
Some small Kansas communities “don’t have any younger people in them anymore,” says Hirsch, “and so it’s very difficult for them to recruit new people” to their volunteer fire departments.
That’s not the end of the story.
Russell – the Andover chief who said volunteerism is the worst he’d ever seen – heads a “combination” force: career firefighters augmented by volunteers. His community, situated outside of Wichita, is growing quickly, more than doubling in population since the beginning of the century. The pool of potential volunteers shouldn’t be a problem.
But he believes social changes have put a stranglehold on the supply of volunteers.
“We get our social connection via the little computer in our pocket,” he says. “There’s times in my life where the fire departments that I’ve been involved in have not only done really great work, but they’ve also been a social club for the men and women who were a part of them. And it gave us a sense of belonging not only to the group, but also to the community.”
Now, he says, “that sense of belonging is absent, and we haven’t woken up to that yet.”
Stukey offers a similar diagnosis.
“I’d say for the last 15 years or 20 years, that there was less volunteerism” among potential volunteers, he says. “Less willingness of giving up their personal time.”
The reason all this matters is simple: A volunteer fire department is less resilient when it has fewer volunteers, less able to respond to blazes and other emergencies quickly and efficiently.
National fire safety standards suggest that a crew of 17 firefighters is needed to effectively fight a blaze in a 2,000-square-foot home, Russell says, and get to the scene within seven minutes.
“There are many, many, many fire departments in Kansas – and I would say across this country – who don’t have 17 members,” he says.
“Every person that you take out of that effective response force, that means more people have to do more jobs. So if we go to 16 (firefighters), then somebody is doing two jobs. And 15, two people are doing two jobs, and so on and so forth. So the more people you take out of that effective response force equation, the more dangerous it becomes – not just for the community, but also for the firefighters.”
WHO VOLUNTEERS
Out in Sheridan County, Hirsch says the robust volunteer force for his department is no accident. Yes, there is an ongoing culture of volunteerism, but there is also a degree of effort involved.
“There are a lot of places who struggle to get people, and we don’t have that problem,” he says, but that involves “24/7, 365-day recruitment, because we can’t ever get behind – can’t ever get behind the ball.”
Who to target? There are several types of people who become volunteer firefighters, Russell says.
The first: “The largest contingent are people who are just good,” he says. “They’re good people, and they just want to serve. So that is the majority. They want to serve their community. They want to serve humankind. I’m not trying to be grand about this. It is literally in their core that this is the way that they are serving and giving back to their community.”
The second: “Adrenaline junkies or something like that. Those folks don’t last that long, but we do have some folks that come through like that.”
And the third: “I have a chunk of folks that join volunteer fire departments to get education and training and experience, so they can get a job at a career fire department.”
Blake Bowman, a 29-year-old construction company owner in Riley County, arrived at the task with a mix of motivations. He joined Stukey’s department a year and a half ago, after seeing volunteer crews in North Dakota.
“Their volunteer fire department is just volunteers with sprayers,” he says. “It was kind of wild.”
Why did he join?
“Someone has to do it. It’s definitely an adrenaline rush – it’s fun to go put out fires, if you’re into that aspect of it. Working accidents isn’t fun,” he says.
Bowman also enjoys hanging out with, and learning from, older firefighters. “It’s always a good time listening to their stories. It gets your blood pumping.”
It’s difficult work, he says, that sometimes takes a toll on his young family. But Bowman believes it’s worth it.
“If a guy has a longing for community service,” he says, “you get that fulfillment for sure.” Saving lives and property offers “a feeling of accomplishment. When you do it, it sure feels like you’ve done something right.”
GETTING TO WORK
Once volunteers like Bowman do join, Stukey says, they have a lot of work to do.
“They’ve got to show up for training. It’s not just going on calls,” he says. “They’ve got to do their part and come help clean the fire station once a month … maybe help them do truck checks and then attend training so that they’re prepared and educated on how to respond to fires.”
So how to get a consistent, dedicated and renewable crop of volunteers who will stick around?
Hirsch’s solution: Start ’em young.
“Overall, there is probably an issue with (volunteer departments) not recruiting among young people, and we’ve got to do that,” he says. His department has an “explorer” program for 15- to 18-year-olds.
“You’re not perhaps hands-on, but they’re learning about the fire service,” he says. “it’s kind of like fishing. If you can set the hook in the fish, you can land them. What we’ve done with our young people too is trying to get them involved fairly early on so that they get as their so that they get that in their mindset.”
Too many volunteer departments don’t recruit young people, Hirsch says. “I know of departments that don’t care about recruiting the next generation,” he wrote in the journal article. “They are happy right where they are, with an aging membership.”
Stukey sees it a bit differently.
“I think volunteer departments in general have had to be more proactive in recruiting and figuring out how to reach that younger population better,” the Riley County chief said. “And so I think maybe that’s helped.”
All recruiting could use more than extra effort, though. Policy solutions would help.
“You know who really needs to know about this is the elected officials,” says Russell, “because they’re responsible for providing the resources that are needed at the local level.”
There have been state and local efforts across the country. In Ohio, a task force devoted to the issue resulted in the launching of an online recruitment portal this summer. Virginia’s Botetourt County has started a new program to pay volunteers up to $20 for each call they go out on, with additional bonuses for completing additional training and certification milestones. The town of North Tonawanda, New York, has begun offering $3,000 stipends to volunteers. Other municipalities are considering small tax credits for serving as a firefighter.
Resources could also come from the federal level. In May, U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman, a New York Democrat, introduced a bill in Congress that would make volunteer firefighters eligible for student loan forgiveness, expanding the federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness program that already provides relief to young government workers and nonprofit employees who work 10 years in their field and make 120 monthly payments on their loans.
Volunteer firefighters “deserve nothing less than the full support and resources afforded to all public servants,” Goldman said in a news release.
No action has been taken on the bill.
Putting out the ashes
Having somebody around to respond to an emergency is important to rural communities, Hirsch says. But helping volunteer departments survive goes beyond that.
“The fire department in the community tends to be the glue that binds that community together,” he says. “There are a lot of smaller towns that have lost their school. They’ve lost their grocery store. They may not even have a bank anymore. So they lose their community identity except for the fire department.”
As a practical matter, too, a shortage of firefighters doesn’t mean a shortage of fires.
“Depending on where it is, then you call the neighboring counties,” Stukey says. “We’ll call Marshall County or call Pottawatomie County or Clay County and say, ‘Hey, we got a fire up in the north’” and ask them to send “mutual aid” firefighters.
But that can be a problem as well.
When there aren’t enough firefighters, Hirsch says, “the neighbors are gonna have to pick up the pieces. And when I say ‘neighbors,’ I’m not just talking the fire department – I’m talking about the taxpayers in those neighboring communities who are actually shouldering the burden for the communities.”
Mutual aid, he says, “works OK until somebody figures out, ‘Wait a minute, why am I taxed for a fire department and the neighbor isn’t and we’re going to their calls?’”
Bowman is worried what happens when some of his older colleagues start to age out of the service.
“Once the older generation retires from it, we’re screwed,” he says. “I’m flexible, because I own my own business, but a lot of young guys don’t have the freedom to leave their job to respond to a call. The volunteers we do have have a limited window, it’s just evenings and weekends.”
Russell isn’t sure what happens next. The challenges go beyond a shortage of firefighters, toward broader questions of capacity. A new fire engine costs $1 million, he says. For small towns, “there is no way they can tax their constituents enough to pay for the service.”
“We have to start having honest conversations that the model that we’ve used since the ’40s and ’50s and ’60s is failing,” he says. “We are not going to be able to sustain this.”–
That might mean less service, making communities more vulnerable.
“There’s a model where you consolidate fire departments across the county, and instead of seven minutes, they get there in 27 minutes,” Russell says, “and they’re there to help clean up – to put out the ashes.”
This article was republished here with the permission of: KLC Journal