What Is Behind The Decline In Fire Service Recruitment

The job of a fire fighter isn't what it used to be. Accept Charlottesville, Va., for example, where in just the by eighteen months the burn down departments in the city and surrounding Albemarle County have searched the wreckage of a plane crash in a hard-to-reach wooded area, performed water rescues after jump floods, responded to the derailment of a passenger train carrying Republican members of Congress and, nearly memorably, provided medical assist during white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, including one incident that left three people dead final summer. This was all in addition to dealing with downed power lines, an ammonia leak, frozen pipes and yep, fifty-fifty a few fires.

The workload of fire departments has grown substantially, even equally their core mission -- putting out fires -- has dwindled. "Communities tend to lean on the fire service in times of crunch," says Charlottesville Burn down Chief Andrew Baxter. "People are looking to the burn down service for leadership and partnership for all aspects of emergency response."

But that e'er-evolving mission has brought new strains. It requires training and planning for new dangers such as ceremonious disturbances or active shooters. With increased telephone call volumes, it requires more personnel at a time when a growing number of agencies are finding it difficult to recruit both career and volunteer firefighters, and to diversify their workforces to include more women and minorities. And it comes every bit some cash-strapped cities are questioning whether the one-time organization of responding to larger telephone call volumes by deploying more firefighters with bigger equipment at more than fire stations is sustainable anymore.

As an affluent city of 47,000 that is dwelling house to the University of Virginia, Charlottesville is no backwater. But information technology's stuggling with how to meet today'southward new demands like everyone else. Information technology alone couldn't handle the events of Sabbatum, Aug. 12, 2017, when white supremacists gathered for a "Unite the Correct" rally and thousands of counterprotesters came out to oppose them. The urban center and county reached out to departments throughout the land to be prepare with fire suppression, hazardous material controls and emergency medical teams to respond to events. The Charlottesville Fire Section ultimately helped coordinate a massive emergency response, one of the largest public safety deployments in Virginia history.

Tensions were high. Local firefighters spent 72 hours in what fire officials depict as a gainsay environs. Baxter was worried enough well-nigh their status to bring in mental health counselors from around the country who specialized in treating firefighters. That Mon, every Charlottesville firefighter took the day off. Five engine companies, a ladder truck, a battalion main and four medic units from departments elsewhere in Virginia kept sentry over the urban center. "We turned over fire and rescue duties for Charlottesville for 24 hours," Baxter recalls. "Nobody said no. Information technology was a special moment."

And it'due south a moment that's emblematic of firefighters' irresolute roles. In 2016, the last year for which data is available, fire departments in the Us responded to 35.three million calls. That's more than three times equally many as in 1981, even though the U.S. population increased by only 42 percent. The hitting thing is that, during that time, the number of fires that these departments responded to actually roughshod to less than one-half of the number in 1981. Past 2016, fires made up less than iv percentage of all the calls that fire departments responded to. Medical emergencies deemed for 68 per centum.

The growing share of medical emergencies handled by fire departments is a long-developing trend, just departments still struggle to adjust to their irresolute mission. On the one hand, their new office as "all-risk, all-take a chance" response teams makes them indispensable in disaster planning and mitigation. On the other mitt, the more their core duties devious from fire suppression and rescues, the more hard it is to train, recruit and retain the workers they need. "Our recruiting pamphlets for fire departments show people fighting fires in their bunker gear or pulling people out of vehicles," says Thomas Jenkins, the fire chief in Rogers, Ark. "But the first thousand calls in a firefighter'south career may not involve whatever of those things. We save exponentially more people in emergency medical intendance. Merely we don't exercise a good job educating people nearly what it is."

At that place are several other reasons why recruiting and retention have grown more hard. One is that the financial payoffs don't look every bit attractive for salaried firefighters equally they one time did. Pensions for veteran firefighters have generally remained intact, simply retirement benefits for new recruits are less generous than they were earlier the Cracking Recession. Salaries take been substantially flat, with national median pay hovering around $49,000 for the past several years. Now that the nation's unemployment is downwardly to around iv percent, firefighters are looking at other opportunities earlier in their careers than they one time did. Their grooming in emergency medicine can make them bonny candidates for jobs in wellness-intendance professions, something that was not the case a couple of decades ago.

While there's been a slight uptick in the number of career firefighters from 2010 to 2015, departments are all the same having a hard fourth dimension meeting staffing demands.

This is especially true in smaller jurisdictions. Industry standards crave a minimum of four firefighters assigned to every engine or pumper. More than than a third of cities with at least half a million people reported in 2015 that they did non meet that staffing threshold, compared with a fifth in 2010. Only amidst cities with populations between 50,000 and 100,000, fourscore per centum did non meet the four-fighters-per-engine standard. The unavoidable truth, says Jenkins, "is that we accept a very legitimate recruitment and retentiveness problem for total-fourth dimension fire departments. Near every department is seeing a decrease in people testing and applying to be firefighters." The situation but promises to get worse equally a wave of baby boom firefighters retires over the adjacent several years.

Role of the trouble is disarming candidates to sign up for the intense lifestyle of burn down service. For career firefighters, for example, that unremarkably means working a 24-hour shift and and so getting two days off. "Information technology's hard to maintain a work-life balance with families and side jobs," says Jenkins. "If you've had two or three calls subsequently midnight, it's tough to exist a good dad, a skilful married man or to go to a second task."

Smaller departments that rely heavily or exclusively on volunteer firefighters have been grappling with this problem for a long time. Dave Finger of the National Volunteer Burn down Council says the number of volunteers has remained about the same, but call volumes have increased significantly. Small-boondocks residents who might be interested in volunteer fire work are traveling ever-longer distances to get to their regular jobs, leaving less time for pursuits like volunteering.

And then there'southward the unproblematic affair of figuring out whose chore information technology is to recruit new members when the whole department is made upwardly of volunteers. "How much bandwidth does a volunteer fire master have to engage in a professional recruitment entrada," Finger asks, "when he or she besides has to brand sure everybody is trained, has to make sure that the department'southward equipment is maintained, and has to get out at that place and respond to calls?"

Many rural fire departments accept switched from all volunteers to a mix of volunteers and career firefighters, specifically so they tin can have a full-time fire chief to take intendance of all the administrative tasks and paperwork.

Meanwhile, fire departments are struggling to become more diverse; they are still overwhelmingly white and male. Among career firefighters, only almost 5 pct are women. Blacks and Hispanics are also underrepresented. The gap is significantly wider in many major cities. Merely women and minorities are ameliorate represented among paramedics and emergency medical technicians working for burn down departments -- 31 percent of paramedics and EMTs are women, 10 percent are blackness and 9 percent are Latino. Paramedics and EMTs are by and large paid less than firefighters.

In the #MeToo era, sexual harassment, misconduct and discrimination lawsuits against burn down departments create serious image bug and recruitment obstacles. In Fairfax Canton, Va., the fire main recently stepped down after years of criticism over how the department -- which is widely respected for its urban search-and-rescue team -- handled charges of bullying, favoritism and harassment. The scrutiny came when a 31-year-old firefighter killed herself, following online harassment from her colleagues (it was unclear whether those comments played a role in her suicide). Burn down Chief Richard Bowers ultimately retired after the widower of the firefighter called for his resignation.

In Chicago, 5 women paramedics sued the Chicago Fire Department, charging that they were groped and harassed by their superiors. One veteran field primary, the suit claims, used a special key to unlock the sleeping quarters of a paramedic as she slept. Salt Lake City is fighting allegations of sexual harassment, discrimination and retaliation afterward its burn department demoted and so fired its beginning female battalion chief. In San Diego, a captain filed a lawsuit in May alleging that her coworkers groped her, unzipped her shirt, shared sexually explicit images, sent suggestive and unwanted text messages, denied her promotions routinely given to her male colleagues, and so made her harassment complaints public, which led to more than harassment.

Charlottesville firefighters attend to a protester injured in a skirmish during the "Unite the Right" rally. (AP)

Fire departments are wrestling with these damaging personnel bug as they confront rising demands on their resources and infrastructure.

State and local governments spend roughly $ii billion a year on structure for fire departments, an amount that's been slowly inching up in inflation-adjusted terms since the end of the Corking Recession. Simply Jenkins, the Arkansas fire master and a former president of the International Association of Burn Chiefs, says getting local officials and voters to support new spending on firehouses has become tougher. "Fire departments had a trend when they needed resources to make a generic statement: 'We save lives. If we don't get what we demand, there are dangerous consequences,'" he says. That argument is non working as well in an era when local governments face tighter budgets and a skeptical public that scrutinizes local spending. "People want to make sure local government is accountable," Jenkins says. "That'south driven fire departments to articulate their demand."

1 way to practise that is to stress the claiming to abide past manufacture standards, peculiarly one specifying that fire services should make it at the scene of a call within four minutes of leaving their station. (That's become an particularly of import criterion every bit open residential floor plans and more flammable household items brand fires burn hotter and faster.) Accrediting agencies consider how well fire departments see that standard of promptness, so information technology makes sense for cities to plan their infrastructure effectually achieving those goals. "For a long time, there was merely one answer: build a new fire station," Jenkins explains. "That's still going to exist a solution sometimes." His ain department in Arkansas asked voters in August to fund a new station. "But sometimes improving road infrastructure or moving a fire station to a major arterial can have a small simply important touch likewise."

That's one reason, in fact, that Jenkins was involved in planning not just the fire section projects, but also the road plans in his urban center's recent bond question. "Road connectivity volition greatly reduce the need to build more burn stations every bit our city continues to grow," he says.

It's some other sign that burn down agencies are becoming more securely enmeshed in aspects of local government many of them used to ignore. In the Charlottesville area, fire departments are playing a disquisitional role in the design of new housing developments, particularly the creation of walkable areas with narrow, tree-lined streets and houses clustered closely together. Those designs can go far difficult for fire trucks to get through on neighborhood streets, an issue that has generated plenty of conflict in other places.

Just those conflicts can be avoided, says Dan Eggleston, the chief of the Albemarle County Section and president of the International Association of Fire Chiefs. "The fire department likes those [walkable] designs if we get in on the early stages of the planning procedure. We are non opposed to these designs. We take wonderful designs that alloy our need for access with the desire for walkable communities."

Installing flat curbs at intersections can help fire engines make sharp turns, and parking restrictions assistance not only fire trucks, but school buses and trash trucks as well, Eggleston says. Recently, he was involved in the planning of a development that had a grass courtyard instead of a street. That might have prevented fire trucks from getting to the residences in example of a fire. Then they reached a compromise: The developer installed porous pavers that could hold a 100,000-pound ladder truck simply still allow grass to grow through them.

Not all departments have been so accommodating. Firefighters in Baltimore, for example, accept fought vehemently confronting proposed bike lanes that, they argue, will non get out enough room for big equipment, such as tiller trucks with outriggers that anchor the trucks when ladders are in use. To make their point, firefighters filmed a video exterior the firm of a leading bike activist to show the difficulties of using burn equipment on narrow streets. Adding to tensions, cycling advocates complained to the city quango that firefighters threatened them at a hearing on the effect. The cyclists ultimately won a courtroom battle that prevented Baltimore from trigger-happy out a recently installed bike lane.

San Francisco has taken almost an opposite arroyo to the growing demand for walkable streetscapes: buying smaller fire engines that are better adapted to operate in tighter spaces. These new trucks are narrower, with fewer protruding parts than the fire engines they replaced. They accept a smaller turning radius, and they're outfitted with cameras that help avoid crashes with vehicles, cyclists or pedestrians.

In Portland, Ore., Fire Chief Mike Myers makes the case that the fire department ought to exist leading the movement toward more walkable neighborhoods. Those environments help ameliorate the wellness and safety of residents, he says, and they haven't led to any reduction in the fire department's response times.

"Our opinion from the fire service is that vibrant cities don't burn," Myers says. "If we change the vibrancy of an area, then that surface area won't have a high likelihood of a shooting. That area will not have a high likelihood of a pedestrian accident and will not likely accept a fire. That is our goal. And that's where we're putting our money and our attention."

Myers argues that burn departments need to become involved in those problems earlier, because the city can't afford to keep hiring more firefighters and ownership more equipment to cover the escalating needs of its growing population.

The Portland Fire Department is currently working with researchers at Harvard University to develop predictive analytics that can tell them where fires are most likely to occur. Meanwhile, each of the city's 31 firehouses is developing plans to address the issues they nearly commonly face up, whether those are wildfires or health problems among homeless people. The idea is to get the fire department to work with other authorities agencies and nonprofit groups to alleviate those problems. "If nosotros tin can [do better] at cooperating with multiple bureaus," Myers says, "I'm doing my job as a fire chief by ultimately making certain the phone call doesn't happen in the first place."