r/Firefighting • u/DarthJellyFish • Jun 30 '24

Volunteer / Combination / Paid on Call Shoutout to the volly’s

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Just a shoutout to you guys that volunteer. I work for a full time city department in the Pacific Northwest. My uncle is an HVAC guy in a one stoplight town in southern Utah. He started volunteering about 8 years ago. I came down to see him and family this week. Checked out the rigs and got to talk about how they do things. You volunteers have to do a lot with a little and it’s truly impressive. Nothing but respect.

The pic is of their reserve rig. Such a cool old truck. The frontline unit is a little newer ;)

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u/Ok-Buy-6748 Jun 30 '24

For those that want every square inch of our USA to have fire protection, volunteers are needed to provide it for areas with little or no tax base.

It would be great to have a paid staffing for the entire country, but the Federal gov't sees fire protection as a local level responsibility.

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u/just_an_ordinary_guy VFF Jul 01 '24

What I find frustrating is numerous and I'm not sure if I can shit out a fully coherent thought, but here's an attempt.

People move to the suburbs and exurbs in greater numbers. They want lower taxes, that's part of the reason they moved. But they want everything good a city provides. Providing those services in a less dense area costs more money per unit of tax collected.

The typical transplant who is used to services provided by the government (which I'm not saying is a bad thing, I'm actually in favor of it) does not volunteer. That's working class work and they're professional/managerial class, or at least they think they are. Hell, a lot of them don't even realize that the fire department where they live is staffed by volunteers, not like they'd join as I said. Add to that the typical excuses "oh, I have a busy job, kids, baseball games, busy life" and that's a big part of dwindling volunteers as the areas served by volunteers see higher call volumes.

So, what I'm saying is that the areas often served by volunteers do actually have a tax base, or do have enough folks to properly staff a volunteer department very well. But they don't want to get dirty and they don't want their taxes going up, which means the local politicians don't want to raise taxes and offend their base. And when a house burns down they get pissy. The truly rural areas, this low tax base does apply.

Idk, I have a lot of points in there, but one point I haven't made yet is that if public safety was actually important to these people, a lot more of these suburban areas would be career and not vollys.