Sorry, we’ve been away either being on duty and getting our butts kicked or working on campaigns, fund raising, or having meetings…Needless to say its been busy but very productive.
This week we saw a posting from King 5 TV that talked about the downturn in volunteers… This is a big deal to us because not only have we noticed it being difficult to maintain volunteers in Lacey but the surrounding departments are having a hard time too. This concerns us specifically because our back up or our surrounding communities that are mostly volunteer, they just don’t have the people around to send like they used to. Like today, a tree on fire in North Olympia took the entire combined resources of both Fire district 7 and 8. Also today, a moderate size out of control burn pile in South Yelm/Rainier took our water truck from downtown Lacey and the water truck from Old 99 and 93rd avenue SE because that was where the closest a water truck with someone available to drive it was available. There are fire departments in this county that if a call happened right now, they have more equipment in fire stations than they have people to drive it. A house fire 10 years ago could be an all volunteer show from one single fire department would today be a mixed paid and volunteer group from perhaps 4 to 6 other departments.
Again, there is no war against volunteers…There is a perception by some that there is paid/volley war, but this is just scapegoating for a much larger series of problems and issues. When we say “staffing”, we mean anyone we can get who can do the job. Here’s proof about others fire departments having problems:
http://www.king5.com/topstories/stories/NW_062909WAB-volunteer-firefighters-down-SW.1ba02d4f.html
Thanks for reading and watching.