Copyright 2006 THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
By DIANE JENNINGS
The Dallas Morning News
HOOD COUNTY, Texas — The alarm sounds at a small metal building that serves as a fire station on the outskirts of Granbury. A handful of firefighters jump on a gleaming yellow truck that barrels down back roads, stopping to pick up a fireman in front of his house before racing to the scene.
The alarm last week turned out to be false; a jittery neighbor saw billows of construction dust and thought it was another wildfire.
“People are nervous,” said Mike Bell, chief of the North Hood County Volunteer Fire Department. Then Chief Bell went back to his real job - at the local water department.
The wildfires that have scorched a large swath of rural Texas since last month highlight the work by Chief Bell and more than 30,000 other active volunteer firefighters in the state. In Texas, as in most states, most firefighters are volunteers.
A survey by the Texas Forest Service found that only a third of the state’s firefighters are paid. Most of those are in urban and suburban areas.
But when it comes to the recent prairie fires, volunteers are “the initial attack resource for the state of Texas,” said Don Galloway, who works with volunteer departments for the Forest Service.
“Texas tends to rely on the rural fire department very heavily,” he said.
Hood County, with a population of nearly 50,000, relies entirely on volunteers for fire protection. There are nine departments in the county and about 230 firefighters, depending on who’s counting.
And though they might seem like anachronisms, today’s volunteer fire departments are not quaint relics.
Volunteers respond to pagers instead of sirens, and while there are no minimum firefighter standards, more than two-thirds of them have gotten enough training to be certified.
And because of funding increases related to the Sept. 11. attacks and increased state concerns over urban sprawl, the volunteer departments are less reliant on antique engines and garden hoses these days. Even small departments boast an impressive array of equipment, from pumper trucks to individual “bunker gear” that includes everything from fire hats to red suspenders.
For example, when the Granbury Volunteer Fire Department responded to a medical emergency last week, Assistant Chief Kevin Jones — whose paying job is city fire inspector — asked his responders if they knew where the call came from.
Nope, responded Lt. J.W. Lanham, but the firetruck’s “little computer will tell me.”
Rosemary Moninger, Hood County’s deputy fire marshal, said the average response time here is five minutes or less.
“That’s something that we’re extremely proud of throughout this county,” Ms. Moninger said. “And I personally would match any one of our fire departments and firefighters against any [paid department].
“We’re just as good.”
In the suburbs
Surprisingly, not all Texas volunteer fire departments are in small towns like Granbury, population 5,000. The two largest volunteer departments in the state serve the Cypress-Fairbanks area and Pasadena, near Houston, said Helen Johnson, outgoing executive director of the State Firemen’s and Fire Marshals’ Association of Texas.
Both areas have populations at or above 145,000. According to a federal survey, the Cy-Fair department has 55 paid firefighters and 375 volunteers. Pasadena has only one paid worker and 160 volunteers.
In the Dallas area, Rockwall depends on 42 volunteers and six paid staff members.
“Nine times out of 10, you’re not going to be able to tell at all when they drive up” whether a department is staffed by volunteers or paid firefighters, Ms. Johnson said.
One reason for the quality: Many volunteers are current or retired firefighters from other departments.
Donnie Davis, chief of the volunteer force in Nocona, in Montague County near the Oklahoma border, spent 25 years as a paid firefighter in Farmers Branch.
“I’ve got several firefighters on this department that are as good as anybody I ever had on my tailboard that was paid,” said Chief Davis, whose town was threatened recently by the fire that destroyed most of Ringgold.
Rockwall Fire Chief Mark Poindexter estimates that almost half of his volunteers are paid firefighters in other cities.
Rockwall, unlike many departments, requires physical screenings. But even those without rigorous screenings are careful in how they deploy personnel. In the North Hood County department, for instance, two retirees serve as drivers but don’t fight fires.
“Everybody’s got a place,” said Chief Davis of Nocona. “You can’t take a guy that’s out of shape and put him on the end of the hose line. ... You’ve got to be wise enough to put everybody in a position that they can handle and make them feel part of the team.”
Staying in operation
Still, officials acknowledge such departments face huge challenges, such as recruiting, training and retaining volunteers, and maintaining equipment.
For Station 70, another Hood County volunteer fire department, just keeping the doors open is a struggle. “We’re getting by - barely,” said Chief Johnny Miller, who works as a deputy sheriff.
Like the other eight departments in Hood County, Station 70 receives some funding and equipment from the county. It also asks for $12 a year per resident from a local homeowners group. But there’s never enough money to maintain equipment the way the station would like.
Sometimes, Chief Miller said, he pulls out his own credit card to “put enough fuel in the truck to get it back to the station to put gas in it.”
He estimates that the department, which consists of 11 volunteers, has to raise about $20,000 a year. That’s hard to do in a community that’s home to many retirees on fixed incomes. The department has held chili suppers, barbecues and Mexican dinners, as well as a “boot drive” to raise money.
But money isn’t the only issue. Recruiting volunteers also can be difficult.
“There are not a lot of people who want to run into a burning building,” Chief Miller said.
Sometimes people will sign up, only to quit when they realize how much time and commitment the job requires.
“A lot of young people that join, they really don’t think it through,” said Assistant Chief Gary Tillison.
Chief Tillison’s real job is running a pizza parlor, and he has to leave the business when an alarm sounds - as happened more than 300 times last year. He also attends weekly training and a monthly business meeting. In addition, he spent a week’s vacation attending “fire school.”
That kind of intensely personal commitment is not unusual.
“They don’t ever know when to quit,” said Ms. Johnson of the State Firemen’s and Fire Marshals’ Association. “It is amazing to me how many times I’m asked to come and give a presentation for someone who’s been there 50 years.”
But that commitment is getting harder to find, said Chris Bonner, deputy director of the association and chief of the Manchaca Volunteer Fire Department outside Austin. The department recently started paying two part-time firefighters and one full-timer to staff the station 10 hours a day - because sometimes few volunteers, if any, responded to a fire alarm.
Alarms don’t go unanswered when that happens, because other departments are paged to fill in, but “the response times were being affected,” Chief Bonner said. “We could not guarantee a response if a call came out in the middle of the daytime.”
Combinations
Daytime responders can be particularly hard to find, fire officials say, because many people live in one community but work in another. As a result, more volunteer departments are relying on both paid and volunteer staff.
“I get really scared every time I look at who’s working in Fort Worth,” said Steve Perdue, chief of the Mineral Wells Volunteer Fire Department, which has about one staffer for every three volunteers. He estimated that half of his 35 volunteers work outside Mineral Wells.
Chief Perdue would like to see some minimum standards for volunteer departments.
“A volunteer fire department can be as good or as bad it wants to be,” he said.
But “most of them are good,” he said, “because people realize this is serious business, and people know people can get killed.”