First Responder Calls

I am with a 100% volunteer fire dept. who has about five guys that are first responders. There is a county squad that is also volunteer in our station and it seems that they are always out of service due to lack of participation. The county is starting to send other fire depts into our territory for first responder calls along with the nearest Squad, for assistance. But the squad does not always need the help, and a few guys feel like we are getting our faces slapped with the other depts coming into town. Personally I do not want to be a first responder but I will if need to be, and other guys are just shutting their pagers off to totally avoid the first responder call (which i think is total horse shit) and to just make fire calls or accidents. But they are the first ones to bitch when they did not make the first truck out to the big one because the seen the fire trucks go by there house and not have their pager on. How do we try to get these guys to take the blind folds off and realize the fire service is starting to change and that other resposibilities are starting to be put on the fire dept?

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Permalink Reply by Jack/dt on May 4, 2010 at 8:31pm

Jeff,

So by the same token, a department shouldn't mandate their members all be firefighter I, so as not to chase away "good members"? What if they're all required to be competent in motor vehicle extrications? Gonna lose some there too?

Seems to me the tail is wagging the dog. If the department seeks to fill a needed gap by supplying EMS to the department's mission statement it's hard to believe that the members would refuse to respond. How is this different from those people that only show up for 'smoke showing' calls and ignore all of the others?

If people are going to leave a department because they don't want to do EMS then what other lines will they draw with regard to what they will and won't do? You know, like climb ladders, enter smokey hallways, pick up hose, etc.