Copyright 2006 Chattanooga Publishing Company
By DICK COOK
Chattanooga Times Free Press (Tennessee)
JASPER, Tenn. — Jasper Fire Chief Paul West has spent 35 years in the fire service, including 18 as a firefighter with the U.S. Air Force. Chief West last week talked with the Chattanooga Times Free Press about challenges facing rural and small-town volunteer fire departments in a growing area.
Q: Last week Jasper had its first fire fatalities in about 20 years. How have your volunteers reacted?
A: I had a group of counselors come in Thursday night to talk to my firefighters.
It was a wake-up call in a sense. Much of this job is day in and day out, month in and month out, you have a fire and you go put it out. Then all of a sudden, once in a blue moon it comes down to a life-and-death situation. It’s the real deal.
My firefighters did nothing wrong, but they are second-guessing themselves. You can’t walk through fire. When you get the call, the event is in progress. Time is always against us.
Q: What kind of training do the volunteer firefighters receive?
A: The best I can do is two hours twice a month because of volunteers’ home life. I’ve got four first responders (firefighters who give medical attention before emergency medical technicians arrive) who were trained by instructors from the state fire academy. The instructors came down here and did the training in house.
Q: Georgia has minimum, mandatory training requirements for firefighters. Should Tennessee adopt some kind of standard like that?
A: I think you need it, especially in Tennessee where we are so far behind. A hairdresser has to have 1,500 hours of training to get a license to cut hair, but a firefighter only has to have a driver’s license to drive a firetruck.
Q: What’re the biggest challenges small-town or rural fire departments face?
A: Manpower. Most volunteer departments have a core group of 10 people on the roster. I don’t care if you have a roster of 15 or a roster of 50, you’re going to have that core group that shows up for training and will be there when there’s a fire. Ten percent of the people do 90 percent of the work. That’s true in most volunteer departments.
Q: Is there a solution to the manpower problem?
A: If the powers that be would pay firefighters $7 an hour for every fire they go to or even for training, that would help. Start some sort of retirement fund. Give them some kind of reward system that makes it worthwhile for a volunteer to break away from his job, his second job, family life.
The National Volunteer Fire Council has a formula about how much money the volunteer fire service saves the taxpayers in the United States. A conservative estimate was $35 billion. But the public doesn’t see that.
Q: What have you done to modernize the Jasper Fire Department in the last five years?
A: We went from a house full of junk to some of the best equipment in a four-county area. Most of it was funded through the regular (city) budget. We did get $200,000 in federal grant money in 2001. The Assistance to Firefighters program is one of the best things that ever came along.
The problem is we’re just getting where the fire department should have been all along.