JAMES OSBORNE
The Philadelphia Inquirer


It's been months since Mark Hebler leaped into the cab of the 1989 FMC/Spartan pumper at Cherry Hill Fire Company No. 1, flipped on the siren, and raced to a blaze.

He's ready for another call, though, ready to jump out of bed in the middle of the night, ready for something like the hardware store fire on Route 70 last April.

"We did a real good job on that one," Hebler remembered, sitting around the firehouse on a recent night. "Me and Holmesy, we put a stop on that one."

But there may not be any more fire runs for Hebler, John Holmes, or anyone else at Company No. 1.

In October, the Cherry Hill Fire Department deactivated the company and cut off its funding, leaving its 15 or so members little to do other than sit around the firehouse they own on Beechwood Avenue, shoot some pool, and maybe wax the tricked-out brush truck they enter at firefighting competitions. Earlier this year, the department filed a lawsuit in New Jersey Superior Court to seize the company's fire trucks and boat.

The company - one of three volunteer units in Cherry Hill and the only one certified to actually run into a burning building - is fighting the decision and is awaiting a meeting with the Cherry Hill Board of Fire Commissioners.

The Fire Department began slowly phasing out volunteer firefighters in favor of full-timers in 1994, the result of the growing population's demands on firefighters.

But in the case of Company No. 1, a very public war of words has broken out between the volunteers and Fire Chief Bob Giorgio, who in an interview described the company as "a boys club or a fraternity."

"Serving the public isn't even on their radar," he said.

He points to an incident last June, when he turned up at the firehouse to find teenage girls and firefighters asleep on couches in the living room. Out back he discovered a trash can full of empty beer cans, as well as an aboveground swimming pool the company did not have permission for.

Giorgio reported the firefighters to police, who investigated but did not file charges.

Officials with the fire company acknowledged the incident in June was a violation of station rules but said the firefighters involved were junior members in their late teens and early 20s. They denied the participants had been drinking.

"They had their girlfriends over, watched a movie, and fell asleep. We don't even keep alcohol in the station anymore," said company president Jeffrey Magasiny. "Unfortunately, before we could deal with it, the chief came by and went berserk."

So began a protracted effort to shut down the station, during which Giorgio disclosed many of the company's firefighters had failed to keep up with required training and were no-shows at a number of fire scenes.

"We overlooked a lot of these things over the years in an effort to try and let them build themselves back up," the chief said. "But in the end, it became too much."

Magasiny answers the allegation that his members don't show up at some fire scenes by explaining that the nature of volunteer firefighting - volunteers sleep at home, not at the station like their career colleagues - means by the time his guys even get to the station, many fire alarms will be called off.

But the picture painted by Giorgio, of a clique of loutish men more interested in socializing in their tax-free firehouse than in fighting fires, has prompted the volunteers to go on the offensive.

They ran ads in local newspapers urging Cherry Hill residents to vote against the fire district's $25 million budget. On Feb. 20, a day of low voter turnout, the budget passed easily.

But the outcome wasn't entirely a loss for Company No. 1, which has taken the resulting publicity as an opportunity to try to keep the firehouse open.

"We stirred the pot, got some attention," said Magasiny. "The chief is the leader of the Fire Department, and he's a very controlling person. He just doesn't want the volunteers here anymore."

Going back to 1736, when Benjamin Franklin is believed to have established the nation's first volunteer firehouse in Philadelphia, the job of extinguishing fires has traditionally fallen upon volunteers. To this day, volunteers make up 72 percent of U.S. firefighting ranks, said Kimberly Ettinger, a spokeswoman for the National Volunteer Fire Council.

"When towns grow rapidly, a lot of them switch to career or combination departments," she said. "One of the challenges in getting volunteers is people have less time to commit to something so time consuming. But in the smaller towns, the entire fire department is usually volunteer."

That had been the case in Cherry Hill until 1994, when the Fire Department began hiring full-time firefighters to replace its volunteer companies en masse. Many of the hires were drawn from the volunteer companies, Giorgio said.

In the years since, the members of Company No. 1 have watched their role decrease, along with their membership.

When Dave Austin, a 31-year-old Web developer at the University of Pennsylvania, joined 15 years ago, the company had more than double the current membership of 15. It was getting called out 400 to 500 times a year, as opposed to the 234 calls it received in 2008, its last full year of operation.

Austin joined up with some buddies after one friend's father, a longtime volunteer, invited them to stop by the firehouse. After school and on weekends, they'd ride their bikes to the house and soak up the excitement of a fire alarm ringing and trucks rolling out onto the streets.

"For me, it was about being part of something good," he said. "There's good and bad in high school, but I always looked at this as a real positive at that point in my life."

Most of the volunteers found their way into the fire company through similar circumstances - a father or an uncle was a member, and they joined without thinking too much about it but felt the attraction of belonging to something.

Most went to work out of high school, to jobs in construction or trucking, and the firehouse became their place. They could sit around with like-minded men and watch a game on the big-screen television, even if the department banned drinking in firehouses in the mid-1990s.

And when there was a fire or a snowstorm or any variety of emergency, they rushed to the firehouse in the dead of night to ride off in a gleaming red truck.

Things took a turn in 2004, when the department cut the company's funding and moved it out of the firehouse it had occupied since 1944 and sent it to an abandoned station on Beechwood Avenue.

But the company's members pressed on. They put up drywall and fresh paint. They outfitted the place with leather couches, a pool table, and a communications center to monitor the radio traffic that carried the possibility of another fire.

Now, with department funding cut off, the company is down to about $50,000 in savings - all that's left of some surplus funding when it was receiving taxpayer money.

The company's leaders are looking for fire departments in other towns willing to activate them. Without that, they might have another year, and then the bills don't get paid and the lights go out.

But for now, they still have the house, and the "apparatus," including the pumper truck, the command vehicle, the brush truck, and a boat for water operations.

When the firefighters offered a tour of the station, Hebler pulled the company's command vehicle into the rain so he could give a demonstration of the floodlights.

With a whir, two metal poles rose up from the hulking red-and-white command truck. And then light filled the street, and the guys stood by grinning as Hebler bounded out of the cab.

"Not bad, hey?" he said.

Contact staff writer James Osborne at 856-779-3876 or jaosborne@phillynews.com.

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March 2, 2010