NFPA Journal - July/August 2017 - 32

SHRINKING RESOURCES,

GROWING CONCERN

RESOURCE FOCUS
In many parts of the country, brush, grass, and forest fires
represent a significant portion of the fire events that small
departments respond to annually.

32 | NFPA JOURNAL * J U L Y /A U G U S T 2 0 1 7

volunteer, he says. Now his squad of dedicated volunteers
is aging and there aren't enough young people lined up to
replace them. Despite his harsh take on millennials' priorities, McClure understands that dedicating time to volunteer
firefighting is no easy task. He and his wife are both volunteer firefighters, and it's caused them to miss out on a lot as
parents. "I have to explain to my kids, 'Daddy or Mommy is
out helping people.' It's a huge sacrifice," he says.
There's also a new appreciation of the risks that come
with the job. Decades ago, the concern was being burned or
falling off the truck. Now, other hazards have taken center
stage-cancer, post-traumatic stress disorder, heart attacks.
"There's evidence that says [as a firefighter] you might be
exposed to agents that can lead to cancer or other debilitating conditions," Willette says. "People are asking themselves
if they really want to be exposed to all that."
Meanwhile, towns like Woolwich wonder where their new
volunteers will come from. Maine is the oldest state in the
country by median age-44-and its firefighters are older,
too. The average age of a Maine firefighter is higher than the
average for a Maine citizen, falling somewhere between 45 and
55, according to Ken Desmond, president of the Maine State
Federation of Firefighters. "Not many more years and they'll be
aged out," Brigance says. "There'll be nobody to replace them."
We leave the fire station and drive across the Kennebec
River to Bath, a city of about 8,000. We bump down a dirt
road flanked by gravel piles to a grassy field, home to a
charred metal structure. The property is a training facility
for the Bath Fire Department, but today it's being used by
the Maine State Fire Academy to train a group of new firefighters, most of them young volunteers from across the
state. The academy, a program of the Maine Fire Service
Institute, is seen in part as a recruitment and retention tool

GETT Y IMAGES

where the majority of departments rely on volunteers.
According to NFPA's 2015 U.S. Fire Department Profile, 70
percent of firefighters nationwide are volunteers, and about
85 percent of departments were either all-volunteer or
mostly volunteer. (Majority-volunteer departments are also
found in suburban areas, not just rural ones.)
The number of volunteer firefighters in the U.S. fluctuates.
In 2015, the figure stood at about 815,000, about 26,600
more than the previous year, according to NFPA's fire department profile. But the rate of volunteers per 1,000 people has
steadily declined for the last 30 years, from a high of 8.05
in 1987 to a low of 6.37 in 2011, the result of a mix of social
and economic factors. The attacks of 9/11 ignited a flame of
civic duty in Americans, and many joined the military, police
force, and fire service. Despite all that perceived volunteering, though, the rate of volunteer firefighters per 1,000 from
2002 to 2008 was 7.13, which was identical to the rate from
1995 to 2001 and below the rate of 7.45 from 1988 to 1994. In
the end, 9/11 didn't actually increase the rate of volunteers as
much as it may have stemmed the decline that had occurred
during the 14 years prior 2001. Gradually, the sense of civic
duty spurred by the attacks waned, and in 2008 the economy
crashed. Young people found themselves in debt and without work. All of this, at least in theory, has contributed to
decreased volunteerism in the fire service since then. From
2009 to 2015, the average volunteer rate fell to 6.66.
Others offer a more critical explanation. "The younger
generation is all about me, me, me," Cliff McClure, a fire
chief from Interior, South Dakota, tells me over dinner the
night before the rural symposium. "People want something
out of it nowadays. They want money." McClure's department
protects 1,500 people scattered over 1,200 square miles.
Fifteen years ago, people were "knocking the door down" to

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NFPA Journal - July/August 2017