....I wonder if paying VFD members while on duty wouldn't be a good way to keep people as well as holding the total cost down. Of course there would be many locations where even that option would be prohibitively expense, but I imagine many mid-size towns might be able to pull it off.
Then it's not "volunteer" anymore, is it?
And that's the crux of the issue - the basic concept of the volunteer service is, apparently, incompatible with the modern mode of economic activity. We had a post in this thread, I believe it was a person from Denmark, who cited "long distances to work" as a reason for the decline.
Again, this started as an article for a magazine, it's turned into something much bigger, because there's been ample newspaper reports about the "crisis in volunteer services" and they all cite the same five reasons:
- the decline in manufacturing facilities
- distance people travel for work
- increased working hours (Americans work more hours then the Japanese)
- increased training requirements
- increased pressures of family & school activity
There is absolutely NOTHING that the volunteer service can do about any of these five items. Certainly there are other industries affected by these five factors, but volunteer emergency services are uniquely positioned to suffer the most.
There are two paths leading to two different scenarios for the future of emergency services in America. The first is the path to 100% paid/paid on call or some new version of paid emergency service worker that's not really well defined yet (more on this idea later). The other path is to nothing - no nearby emergency services at all. This isn't as far-fetched as it sounds, as it's happening right now, starting with rural areas that simply don't have anyone to run calls. It's not about houses burning, it's about people laying entrapped in smashed vehicles, with no help coming. It's about dying from a serious cut. It's about a diabetic emergency turning into a diabetic coma.
As I mentioned earlier, we might end up with a new type of emergency service. In rural areas, or even semi-rural areas, it's not uncommon for a fire company to run only 100-200 calls a year, and of those calls, maybe 40% are actually emergencies, the rest are false alarms, good intent, station covers and so forth. Not only would it be expensive to staff a station with no calls for two weeks, it would likely drive the firefighters nuts just sitting around. One model that's emerging is to have the municipal road crew trained and on call as the fire department. That's the case in a few areas around here - the road crew members who want to be be firefighters are paid - as road crew - and are kept "on the clock" - as road crew - when they respond to a fire call. That's not a bad model if the road crew member is interested. That's not always the case.
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