By Michael Shepherd
The Kennebec Journal
PALERMO, Maine — At age 43, Palermo Assistant Fire Chief Mark Curtis is one of his department’s young guns.
“If my pager goes off, I can get myself, my chief and another guy to a call,” he said.
Whether that would be enough to stop a major fire from destroying property is another matter.
His chief, Dean Willoughby, turned 70 in November — the last birthday he will count, he said.
His role in emergencies is now administrative, not rushing into burning buildings.
“My role, more or less, is to make sure everyone’s doing their job,” he said. “If we could get $40,000 a year for it, it’d be better.”
Small-town volunteer fire departments in central Maine are aging and shrinking, leaving diverse public safety needs often in the hands of a dwindling group of volunteers.
According to State Fire Marshal John Dean, there were approximately 10,000 firefighters in Maine — paid and volunteer — around 1990.
Now, he says, there are 8,000. And it isn’t the career men that are going away.
“Typically, you’re seeing reduced numbers all around the state,” said Nelson Collins, one of Dean’s two assistant marshals. “A lot of people don’t work in the community they live in anymore. In years past, it wasn’t uncommon for people to leave work to respond to a fire.”
Vassalboro Fire Department Secretary Donald Breton, 48, who has served the department for 30 years, said his department has gone from 40 members to a low of 19.
Today, there are 22.
“We don’t seem to be losing the 40-, 50- or 60-year-olds,” he said. “Those that are young and going to college are leaving. There’s no business here to keep them around.”
Curtis agreed. “The younger generation’s not stepping up to the plate,” he said
Family affair
Wayne Chief James Welch said balancing a family life, a job and the unpredictability of emergency calls make volunteer fire fighting a tough task.
“When you’re getting calls in the middle of the night and waking up the whole house when you leave, that’s tough,” he said.
Mount Vernon Deputy Chief Tony Dunn said his department has done well recruiting junior firefighters, but “they don’t get the satisfaction.”
“It’s a big commitment (balancing) school and junior (firefighters),” he said.
Montville Fire Chief John York is more blunt.
“The interest of young people is drawn to shopping malls, the Internet, methamphetamines, crack — you name it,” he said.
State Fire Marshal John Dean said Maine’s small-town fire-fighting problems are not unique.
“Overall, the volunteer departments everywhere are struggling,” he said. “I think a lot of social service and fraternal organizations are struggling with ranks — not just volunteer departments.”
But the fact is firefighting is a family affair in many small towns — and perhaps a reason for many volunteer departments’ sustenance.
Matt Dunn, Readfield’s chief, is the son of Mount Vernon Fire Chief Dana Dunn.
Tony Dunn, Mount Vernon’s assistant chief, is the son of Lee Dunn, Mt. Vernon’s deputy chief and Dana’s brother. Judy Dunn, Dana Dunn’s wife, had a grandfather and uncle serve as fire chief.
Liberty Fire Chief Bill Gillespie has a son involved in his department.
And Brandon Curtis, 20, Palermo’s youngest fireman, followed his father into service.
York’s wife, Karen, 54, is the safety officer in Freedom and Montville. On a typical call, she is the communications center, wielding two radios and a cell phone at any given time.
York’s daughter, 20, is on the force in Montville. He has children from a previous marriage who have also worked in department out of state. He also has a 16-year-old son, a junior in the Montville department.
“If we didn’t bring our sons along, we’d have very few young people,” York, 67, said.
Freedom First Assistant Chief Hank Elkins said his department responds to 75 calls in the average year.
“Everybody wants you to be there in a heartbeat, but they don’t realize we’re not here,” Elkins said. “You’re lucky to draw 10, 15 people (to a call) over five towns.”
More costs, fewer staff
Even with fewer bodies, small-town fire departments are doing more jobs — so much so that chiefs say the term “fire department” is increasingly a misnomer.
According to data from the State Fire Marshal’s Office, fires took up only 4.6 percent of total fire department calls in 2010 statewide, down from 6.7 percent in 2003. Rescues were slightly less than 60 percent of calls in 2003; by 2010, they were 66 percent.
The Vassalboro Fire Department responds to 110 calls per year. Its annual budget is around $50,000, Breton said.
About $10,000 of that is spent simply on vehicle maintenance — a good portion of which goes to servicing on “attack vehicles,” the large trucks taken to structure fires.
All vehicles must be inspected yearly, like any passenger car, but technical equipment such as pumps also must be checked to ensure they are working.
According to Dean, these checks are well reasoned, even if a vehicle is not frequently used.
“Most vehicles — having them sit idle is not good,” he said. “It may seem like a tedious job, but when the alarm goes off and the place is on fire, that’s not when you want to discover a problem.”
Mutual aid fire departments — collections of small-town departments that agree to respond by request to other municipalities’ calls — offer a saving grace for small towns with shrinking fire departments.
One is Lakes Region Mutual Aide which serves Fayette, Manchester, Mount Vernon, Readfield, Vienna and Wayne. The Palermo department collaborates with Liberty, Freedom and Montville. Vassalboro works out of two departments, with aid coming from Winslow and China’s three volunteer departments.
Automatic aid, another structure helping small departments, goes a step beyond mutual, mandating departments respond to emergencies in municipalities they have agreements with.
Freedom participates in automatic aid with nine other towns, according to a 2011 town document.
Dean said automatic aid arrangements lower insurance costs for homeowners because towns can credit assistance from other towns as being virtually a piece of their own departments. Mutual aid arrangements do not offer the same benefits, he said.
Wayne Chief James Welch said mutual aid is critical to the existence of his department, which has 18 volunteers.
“Without mutual-aid towns, we wouldn’t be able to do the job,” he said.
Indeed, the rise of mutual-aid fire fighting has pointed to a possible future for public safety in small-town central Maine: regional fire departments.
But Dean cited Maine’s “weak” county government structure as a roadblock to regionalizing fire protection.
He said in many states, county departments do well at breaking down large areas into manageable sections.
“I think a regional or countywide thing would do well here,” he said. “Eventually, there will have to be some large incentives to volunteers — or they’ll have look at consolidating or regionalizing,” Dean said.
No alarm
Readfield Fire Capt. Al Godfrey, 76, of Winthrop, who is in his 58th year serving local fire departments, thinks better training for interested youths is part of the answer.
When he started training people in Readfield more than two decades ago, he said there was a problem with recruiting young people similar to what other towns are seeing now.
Godfrey said Readfield’s training program could be a model for struggling rural departments. The junior orientation program there has helped staffs up the Readfield department currently to 28 adults and three juniors.
The junior training program “has provided us a nucleus of new ones coming in,” Godfrey said. “We’ve had two or three juniors even convince their parents to join.”
A “semi-retired” furnacing engineer, he volunteers maintaining the 1952 GMC Farrar engine the department keeps as a “parade piece.”
“The antique on the antique,” he calls himself.
Though Godfrey said he has “his health,” he said could not do the hard labor required of all firefighters on calls.
So, along with his administrative duties, he drives trucks to fire scenes.
“Long as I don’t have to get on rooves and lug ladders, I’m fine,” he said. “I’ll let the young guys handle the heavy-duty stuff.”
The problem there is — although there is no minimum age to be a junior firefighter — state child-labor laws restrict what they can do at scenes.
Sixteen- and 17-year-olds can fight ground fires, but not ones in vehicles or structures. They also cannot drive fire equipment, wear breathing apparatus, attach red lights to a vehicle in which they respond to fires, or direct traffic at a scene.
Welch, the Wayne chief, said many of these types of regulations “overburden” small departments.
Whatever the future holds, it seems certain that aging rescuers are going to have to pass the baton of the volunteer fire fighting tradition.
For young people such as James Glendenning, 22, of Palermo, the second-youngest person on his town’s department, the reasons to serve are simple.
“For the town,” he said. “I do it for the town — and just because I’ve lived in Palermo my whole life.”
And for the older folks?
“My wife asks me when I’m going to grow up and stop playing with fire engines,” Godfrey said. “Who the hell wants to grow up?”
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