AUGUSTA, Maine — A working group set up by the Legislature to look at low rates of volunteerism for fire departments in Maine got an earful at its first meeting Tuesday in Augusta.
Fire chiefs laid out how their budget and personnel shortages pose a risk for public safety.
If you live in a city or large town in Maine, you probably have at least a corps of full-time professional firefighters to head to your neighborhood for a brush or home fire. But in rural Maine, it’s a different story.
Small towns depend on volunteer fire departments, and volunteers are hard to find. They’ve decreased so much in recent years that it often takes several small-town departments to go to a fire just to get the minimum number of firefighters needed to handle the blaze.
“In today’s age the complexity of what we are trying to do, even with the basic service, is so much higher than it used to be ten even 20 years ago when I started,” said Topsham Fire Chief Brian Stockdale, who has a department with both full-time and volunteer staff. “It’s a whole other world.”
Volunteers need a minimum level of training to go to a fire under state law, and because they have to take courses in the evenings and on weekends, that can take months to meet the requirement.
Several chiefs told the study panel they see fewer residents able to take time from work to go battle a fire during work hours. And Phippsburg Chief James Totman complained that sometimes the courses don’t really fit for small departments like his, and firefighters feel their time is being wasted acquiring skills they will never use.
“Some of the stuff they had there they wouldn’t need, it was more what you would need on a full time or big city,” he said. “I mean like a ladder truck training and stuff. We’ll never see a ladder truck.”
And while firefighters need that minimum training, fire chiefs do not. Often a person is elected by the local department based on popularity, not ability.
Liberty Fire Chief William Gillespie serves on the panel and said he knows of one chief in Waldo County that has no firefighting experience.
“No training, nothing,” he said. “He’s not even, never been a firefighter. He walked in the door and knows nothing about firefighting, none whatsoever. The one thing that he enjoys the most is running his red lights and siren to everything he goes to.”
The Maine Fire Chiefs Association does have training and its own certification program for fire chiefs, and many take advantage of the program, but it is not required.
The panel discussed several approaches to encouraging more volunteers, including tax breaks for firefighters and other incentives.
“Everybody’s problem is money,” said Rep. Timothy Theriault, a Republican from China who serves on the panel. “It’s money, OK? And where is the money going to come from? We can all sit here and sugarcoat this as much as we want, we are preaching to the choir. It’s money.”
The panel’s co-chairman, Rep. Mike Lajoie, a Lewiston Democrat, said in the long term the state and municipalities may have to explore the regional approach used in some rural states, where a department or two with full-time staff serves as the anchor for several departments with only volunteer firefighters.
“Then you would have coverage during the daytime which is a concern right now,” he said. “So, yeah you would probably have more coverage but then you would have to have everybody buy into it. It’s easier said than done.”
The panel has only a few weeks to hammer out some recommendations for the Legislature to consider in January. The legislation creating the panel directs it to report them out by Dec. 2.
This article appears through a media partnership with Maine Public Broadcasting Network.