NFPA Journal - July/August 2017 - 35

wildfire prevention for residents and property owners
through community participation. More than 1,300 communities throughout the country participate. In Canada, a
similar program called Firesmart exists. At the symposium,
Firewise seems to be the biggest tie attendees have to NFPA.
"We have Firewise back in South Dakota, on the western
part, and it's taken off very well," says McClure. "I have found
that if you sit down with people and start talking to them
about Firewise they start to understand."

Politics, inside and out
After Calaveras County was devastated by the Butte Fire,
the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) moved
in to assist the families who lost their homes. Wildfires like
this require departments to work with multiple agencies
on multiple levels, which can be difficult. But disaster management isn't the only time departments have to work with
state and federal agencies, and for rural departments, working with these agencies and even with local politicians can
prove more troublesome than it does for larger departments.
From struggling with the grant-writing process to answering
to municipal governments that don't allocate tax money to
them, rural departments are often at a disadvantage when it
comes to the politics of keeping the public safe.
In March, about 40 volunteer fire chiefs from New England
gathered at a National Volunteer Fire Council event in
New Hampshire to discuss the challenges they face, and
grant writing emerged as a leading issue. According to the
Fourth Needs Assessment, departments of all sizes rely on
Assistance to Firefighters Grant (AFG) funding from FEMA,
mostly for PPE. It's the process of obtaining the money where
rural departments often fall behind.
When I interviewed NVFC Chairman Kevin Quinn late last
year for an article about the need for behavioral health care
in the fire service, he told me the quality of the grant requests
matters as much as the need. "You read some of these grants
and you'll know the department needs this money, but they're
not following directions or writing it clearly and concisely
enough, and so they aren't funded," Quinn said. A pattern of
denied grants can leave rural departments feeling discouraged, so they stop applying for them altogether. Quinn said
teaching grant-writing skills to the volunteer fire service is one
of NVFC's highest priorities. The organization already offers
online courses on grant writing for its members.
On the local level, volunteer departments sometimes elect
a chief versus having one appointed by the municipal government, a system that can create tension between firefighters
and town officials. In May, an entire volunteer department
in the small central Maine town of Newburgh quit after a
disagreement with town selectmen, who refused to reinstate
the former chief. "There's a strong sense of loyalty and support for the chief, and the firefighters don't want to work for
anyone else," Willette says. At the same time, departments
can feel disconnected from their local governments, especially if they receive little or no tax revenue from the towns.
Conflicts can also arise between neighboring departments.
Faced with recruitment and retention issues and districts that

can be thousands of square miles in area, rural departments
often rely on mutual aid. In theory, the practice means more
manpower, more expertise, and more equipment. But when
disparities in training and resources run deep, as is the case in
many rural areas, it can become more problematic than beneficial. "If you've got 15 guys and a heated barn, you can start a
department [in South Dakota]," McClure tells me, shaking his
head in disapproval. The result, he says, is departments that
can show up at an incident with no PPE and little training
and can become a liability to the incident commander. As Jon
Craig of the Petersburg, Indiana, Fire Department, puts it,
"mutual aid is not mutual in that situation."
Better-equipped and trained departments like Craig's can
find themselves picking up the slack for less-prepared ones.
He mentions a department near Petersburg that has "zero
money and zero training," whose calls "take our equipment
and people out of service while we respond to their problems."
The people who live in that district don't care about the shortfalls of their department, he says; they take his department's
response for granted. With no support on the local level, Craig
says states should be more diligent about identifying and providing assistance to underperforming
NFPA.ORG/
departments.
RURAL_FIRE
Within departments, attempts to
Read NFPA's Fourth
solve the volunteer recruitment and
Needs Assessment
retention problem can also cause
Survey of the
U.S. Fire Service,
rifts. While incentivizing firefighters
the 2015 U.S. Fire
Department Profile, by shifting from all-volunteer departand the WUI Fire
ments to combination departments,
Department Wildfire
where some firefighters work as fullPreparedness
time, paid employees, might seem like
and Readiness
Capabilities Report. an effective retention strategy, McClure
says he's seen the practice divide even
Visit the National
Volunteer Fire Coun- the best of friends. Imagine you've
cil's website, which
returned from a call, he says, and now
includes resources
for volunteer
it's time to clean the truck. The volunfirefighters such
teer is going to tell the career firefighter,
as grant-writing
"I'm going home. You clean the truck,"
courses.
because he's not the one getting paid.
Learn more about
One way Willette and Berard-Reed
the new NFPA 1st
Responder
hope NFPA can address these myriad
Connection app
issues is by encouraging more rural
and the Rural
fire service representation in the NFPA
Firefighters
Connection on
standards-development process. WilNFPA Xchange.
lette sees technology as a way to "break
down barriers" and address rural challenges; as remote as
some departments are, nearly every firefighter has Internet
access, which means they can find free content on nfpa.org,
download NFPA's new 1st Responder Connection smartphone
app, and follow NFPA on social media.
Berard-Reed says the next step for public education is
to prove to symposium participants that they weren't just
talking to each other-NFPA was listening. "It's important
that they see we listened to what's going on and are attending to it," she says.
ANGELO VERZONI is a staff writer for NFPA Journal.

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