The term off duty for volunteer fire/EMS personell

When is it considered off duty when the person is a volunteer? I have been asking myself this and was wondering what everyone else thought.

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Permalink Reply by John Crabbe on March 1, 2010 at 12:48am

FETC,
I do agree and such threads like these do get old, but my intentions here were not to stir a pot, but to point out a difference in mindset and actuality of being on duty. I can understand the mindset that one is always on duty, but we know that really isn't the case, there is always time off, selective response and so forth.

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Permalink Reply by Dustin J. Millis on March 1, 2010 at 5:55am

I think the only time when volunteers are really off duty is when we physically cannot respond. Be it from alcohol, meds, injuries, etc... Firefighters always have that mind-set of being ready to respond, whether we are in our district or not, on vacation, with family at the mall... it really doesn't matter. As mentioned earlier, if we see somebody go down at a theme park, were running over to help, if we see a car crash on the highway (and FD isn't on scene yet) were stopping to help. No matter what, that mindset is always there so are we really ever "off-duty?"

The funny thing about firemen is... Night and day they are always firemen. --Backdraft