‘We’re getting thinner and thinner’

New data shows ranks of most active county fire and rescue volunteers down as service calls increase, force ages

It’s one of Rappahannock’s more worrisome fault lines.

For years, the aging of the county’s population has rippled through the community’s fire and rescue companies. More and more trained volunteers are calling it quits as they get older, and younger replacements aren’t coming close to filling the void.

According to a report compiled by Sean Polster, the county’s emergency services coordinator, the number of “active” volunteers — those who respond to at least 10% of the calls — has dropped by more than 27% since 2014. A 2015 report by JLN Associates, a consulting firm hired by the county, counted 69 active members in Rappahannock’s seven fire and rescue companies. Last year, there were 50, according to Polster.

Perhaps more troubling is how that attrition is reflected in the loss of emergency training. By Polster’s estimate, 38 fewer volunteers in the county are certified as emergency medical technicians, or EMTs, than in 2014, and six fewer are trained to be paramedics. Also, 14 fewer volunteers are certified as firefighters.

“We’re getting thinner and thinner,” he said.

Quick response backup

The county has begun taking steps to compensate for the training drain. Since last spring, it has hired 13 career paramedics/firefighters on a part-time basis to supplement responses by volunteers. Operating out of a building next to the Sheriff’s Office in Washington, their quick response vehicle provides 24/7 support on emergency calls.

More recently, a paid paramedic has been working two 24-hour shifts a week at the Sperryville Volunteer Rescue station. It’s a three-month pilot program, launched to address a shortage of volunteers who can provide advanced care. The squad has agreed to reimburse the county for the paid paramedic being used.

Also, the county is in a cost-sharing arrangement with neighboring Warren County to cover the cost of part-time career paramedics at Chester Gap Volunteer Fire and Rescue. That’s been in place since 2020 when six emergency volunteers stopped making calls due to the COVID pandemic.

So far, the mix of paid and volunteer responders appears to be working. “We’ve had very good experiences with them,” said Chief Todd Summers of Sperryville Volunteer Rescue Squad. “It reduces the pressure on us just to know they’re available, especially when we don’t have advanced care providers available.”

Polster agreed. He noted that since the quick response vehicle can head to an emergency as soon as a call comes in, they often are on the scene first. “They’re making a difference,” he said. “The good thing is while they’re waiting for an ambulance to arrive, they’re providing care. So, when the volunteer medic gets there, they basically hand the patient off to them.”

“They’ve integrated really well. We enjoy working with them,” added Sean Knick, president of the Rappahannock County Volunteer Fire and Rescue Association. “I haven’t heard any complaints whatsoever about any of the county’s paid staff.” 

What’s not clear, however, is how the paid/volunteer integration evolves. This can be a tricky transition. Often, it results in volunteers leaving because they feel disrespected, or that they’ve lost control of a station they’ve run for years.

Switching to an all-paid emergency operation would be prohibitively expensive and a highly unlikely option in a county where one of the long-standing priorities of the Board of Supervisors (BOS) has been to avoid local tax hikes.

So, with volunteer numbers still moving in the wrong direction, the challenge going forward is finding the right balance of the roles and responsibilities of career and volunteer responders.

“We need the volunteers,” said BOS Chair and Wakefield Supervisor Debbie Donehey, “We also need to make some headway on a volunteer/paid arrangement.”

To that end, Polster said he has reached out to the International Association of Fire Chiefs for guidance on navigating a shift to more of a combination system. A complicating factor is that the seven volunteer companies in the county are independent operations. The county pays for their emergency services, but doesn’t oversee them.

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The next likely step, said Knick, is to bring in an outside person who could serve as what he described as a “mediator/facilitator,” someone without skin in the game who could engage with the various parties to shape a model that works in a community that has always relied exclusively on volunteers.

“We have to do as a system what is best for the community,” he said. “The community is our customer. We need to provide the services people are paying for with their tax dollars.”

A youth gap

Rappahannock is by no means alone in dealing with a big falloff in emergency volunteers. According to the National Volunteer Fire Council, a nonprofit association representing volunteer fire and rescue services, the number of volunteer firefighters has dropped 23% nationwide since 1985. The certification requirements to provide emergency care and fight fires is considerably more time-consuming and taxing than in the past. Tighter and more extensive regulations have made running a fire and rescue company much more demanding. And, in a culture immersed in cell phones, video games and streaming services, there’s no longer as much social appeal to hanging out at the neighborhood fire hall. 

But the county is particularly disadvantaged when it comes to recruiting younger volunteers. Several chiefs acknowledged that the combination of high housing prices and limited job opportunities make it harder for young families to live here. That makes it that much harder to find volunteers who can handle the more physical demands of emergency response, such as fighting fires.

“You really need some affordable housing for youth if you want them to become volunteers,” said Richie Burke, chief of the Sperryville Volunteer Fire Department. “For a lot of the members, it became a family thing. The sons and daughters tried to stay involved with it. But if they don’t have anything they can do here and they have to work in Northern Virginia, sooner or later, they’re just going to live there.”

It’s not surprising then that the average age of members at five of the county’s seven companies has risen since 2014, with that average hitting 60 at the Sperryville Volunteer Rescue Squad last year. Only Flint Hill Volunteer Fire and Rescue and the Sperryville Volunteer Fire Department saw their members’ average age drop during that period, but that was in part due to the fact that they were the two companies that lost the most members.

At the same time, the number of calls the county’s volunteer companies are running has increased appreciably in the past decade. In 2013, they responded to 837 calls for service. Last year it was 1,260.

Showing appreciation

As well as the first attempt at merging volunteer and paid responders seems to be going, it could run into resistance as the process intensifies. At least some of that could be driven by pride, said Sperryville Fire Chief Burke. For many years, the volunteer fire and rescue companies have been a core component of Rappahannock’s neighborhoods, and longstanding members know the commitment it’s taken to sustain them, while helping generations of county residents get through emergencies.

Any significant changes to how they function will need to be addressed with an appreciation for what that means to older volunteers, said Knick.

“Some of these people have been volunteers for decades,” he noted. “They certainly didn’t want to see this come. But they’ve come to the realization that it was going to have to.

“We’ll take this one step at a time,” he added. “You don’t want to inundate the volunteers with paid staff policies and procedures.”

Polster likewise believes the key to moving forward is to make sure that the role of volunteers isn’t undervalued. “You can hire great staff if you want. That’s fine,” he said. “But if we don’t work in concert, if we don’t ensure that we have a strong and healthy volunteer system, we’re going to feel it just as quickly.”

Donehey was more direct. “It’s going to take teamwork,” she said. “We’re trying to solve a major problem, and it’s going to take everyone.”

Foothills Forum is an independent, community-supported nonprofit tackling the need for in-depth research and reporting on Rappahannock County issues.

The group has an agreement with Rappahannock Media, owner of the Rappahannock News, to present this series and other award-winning reporting projects. More at foothillsforum.org.