By Carrie Sidener
The News & Advance
Copyright 2007 The News & Advance
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News
LYNCHBURG, Va. — The video begins with sounds of the tones that dispatch the Forest Volunteer Fire Department.
The call is a structure fire on Thomas Jefferson Road. The chief responds and suddenly the viewer is in the fire truck with the firefighters responding to the call.
It’s the start of the video that the Forest fire department put together from video footage and photographs taken at the wrecks and fires it responded to in 2006.
“It gives the public a good idea of what we’re doing,” said Monty Coleman, chief of the Forest Volunteer Fire Department.
“We try to keep our Web site updated so we can let the community know what we are doing.”
Forest is not the only fire department that has put together video from its calls. Bedford Fire Department was actually the first in the area to start the tradition. Brookville-Timberlake and Concord also have followed suit.
Brad Creasy, captain of the Bedford Fire Department, started the department’s Web site in 2004. He put together a slide show for its annual banquet as a way of showing the type of calls the department responded to that year. Then he decided to post it on the Web site.
“It took off from there,” Creasy said. “The music pretty much makes it.”
Janet Blankenship, recruitment and retention coordinator for Bedford County, said most of the fire departments don’t intend for their videos and photos to serve as recruitment for new volunteers, but that’s what ends up happening.
“They want people to see what they do, and it’s become a recruitment tool,” Blankenship said. “The average person looking at that video that may have thought about it before can go to the left and click that application. It’s spur of the moment. We can grab them at that point. It’s been a major success so far. We catch them right there.”
Just last year, the Bedford County Department of Fire and Rescue Services created an online application for those who want to become volunteer firefighters.
That tool has been successful, with at least 80 percent of new applications coming through the Internet, Blankenship said.
It’s not just the videos. Fire departments that have Web sites often post photographs from the calls it responds to as well as charts showing call volume. It’s a way of keeping people informed of how the volunteers are serving their community, said Gary Conner, a firefighter for the Boonsboro Fire Department.
Conner began a business of creating Web sites for fire departments after starting Boonsboro’s.
“It’s a great way to reach out to the community,” Conner said. “In a volunteer station, we aren’t always staffed, but our Web site is. You can go there to find more information. If you saw a fire truck going down the road, you can look at our Web site and see why.”
Boonsboro’s site nets about 8,000 hits per month. It’s been up for more than a year.
“It’s our billboard out on the world,” Conner said. “It works the same for the fire service as it does for any other business. It increases awareness in the community and provides community feedback.”
Bedford’s site has been up since 2004, beginning with the idea of documenting the department’s history.
Creasy said the department, which began in 1888, had a photographer who volunteered and up until the 1980s had a good pictorial history of the department and its changes over the years.
To pick up that tradition, the firefighters began carrying cameras in their trucks, Creasy said.
“It educates the public on what we’re doing as a fire department ... It lets them see what kind of quality department they have protecting their homes and properties,” he said.
Creasy said when the site began, it started off receiving 1,500 visits a month and now averages 10,000 a month.
“We are almost 120 years old and at this point, we’ve never turned over a call,” Creasy said. “Our department has never missed a call. It lets the people know how dependable the volunteers are in protecting their property.”
Jerry Womack, chief of the Brookville-Timberlake Volunteer Fire Department, said the department began a site more than seven years ago, but the server it used went bankrupt. The site was resurrected a year ago by the son of one of the officers.
“There are bad things you see on the site,” Womack said. “Someone has a problem. We are trying to put some information about what happened. Ninety percent of our calls are accidents. It’s the same story. Someone ran off the road and overcorrected ? We try to make people more aware.”
Gary Tanner, chief of the Concord Volunteer Fire Department, said the site tends to attract younger people who may decide to become members.
“We need an influx of new blood,” Tanner said. “It’s our future. We need these young people to come into the service. I had one in particular that viewed the Web site and that pushed him over the edge to contact us and join.
“It’s out there and people see it and we’ve got some response from it.”
The Forest Fire Department’s site was first established in March 2006. By the end of the year, the Web site had already had 58,000 hits.
Pictures and video from the accidents and fires help Coleman to tell what works and what doesn’t on the scene, which firefighter wasn’t wearing the proper protective gear and if the members need further training.
Coleman said when they began posting those pictures; it turned into a good tool for fundraising.
“Basically, we wanted to show the public this is what we do and this is why we’re here, to help out,” Coleman said.