Balance Between Paid and Volunteer Firefighters Key to Good Response, Fire Chiefs Say Amid Staffing Shortages

Plans: District 6 Petitioning to Fund New Paid Firefighting Positions to Staff Adna Station

Posted

Like other rural areas, many of Lewis County’s fire districts have historically relied on volunteer firefighters to staff its stations.

But as Lewis County Fire District 6 has discovered in recent years, departments need a balance of paid firefighters and volunteers to maintain reliable, consistent service.

Lewis County Fire District 6, which serves the communities of rural Chehalis and Adna, has historically been a volunteer fire station, but with the district struggling to staff its four stations and respond quickly to dispatched calls, Chief Ken Cardinale is petitioning the fire board to invest in additional paid staff positions.

“Volunteers are fantastic. They’re dedicated people, but they’re all working — they’re not available like they were 20 to 30 years ago,” Cardinale told The Chronicle.

As of June, District 6 had nine full-time paid firefighters and 15 volunteers on a rotating roster; soon to become 14 as one prepares to take a paid position at another station.

Those volunteers each work a minimum of one eight-hour shift per month at the station, but go through hundreds of hours of firefighter training a year. And while that training is undoubtedly necessary, Cardinale said, it creates an intense time commitment for the volunteers.

District 6 has a high volunteer turnover rate because most of its volunteers are people trying to get started in a firefighting career, Cardinale said. Of a class of 12 volunteer firefighters inducted in 2019, only four are still with District 6, Cardinale said: two were hired as paid firefighters and two stayed on as volunteers.

District 6’s current staffing level is enough to reliably staff District 6’s primary station, Station 61, located on Jackson Highway, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But District 6’s three other stations — Station 62 in Adna, Station 63 on Logan Hill and Station 64 on Newaukum Hill — are all unstaffed.

As a result, it takes District 6 an average of 12 to 14 minutes to respond to calls referred to the Adna, Logan Hill and Newaukum Hill stations.

“It’s critical to decrease response time in order to be effective,” said Cardinale, adding that structure fires typically double in size every minute. “The faster we can get to them, the faster we can keep them small.”

The district launched a residential firefighter program this year, which has volunteers live at a district fire station full time and work between eight and 10 24-hour shifts per month, in an attempt to increase its staffing level. Two people applied and were accepted, but Cardinale said that number isn’t enough to make a dent in District 6’s staffing problem.

Cardinale requested that the district’s board of commissioners add three paid firefighter positions into next year’s budget to staff the Adna station, which receives the bulk of District 6’s annual calls, but has so far been told that the commissioners want to wait to see the impact of the residential volunteer program before committing to funding more paid positions.

•••

The National Fire Protection Agency recommends that rural stations staff four to six firefighters per shift. According to a manpower survey completed by Lewis County Fire Chief Association President Gregg Pedersen that compared the number of firefighters on duty in each department at 3 p.m. on any given Thursday, 14 of Lewis County’s 19 fire departments had three or fewer firefighters on duty at the time of the survey and only one — Riverside Fire Authority, which staffs two fire stations — had more than five firefighters on duty.

Riverside Fire Authority employs a total of 25 paid firefighters and typically has five full-time personnel on duty per shift, split between its downtown Centralia and Fords Prairie stations, though that number can dip as low as four and as high as six or seven, according to Riverside Chief Mike Kytta.



“I believe that in most cases we’re able to provide a good match for the demand and the risk that we’re facing on a daily basis; however, there are always extreme situations that come along, whether they’re manmade or natural things that make it more challenging … for the human resources to be there,” Kytta said.

Riverside has a roster of 40 volunteers who sign in and work out of staffed stations.

“And the mission for our volunteers is varied so we have individuals who are fully-qualified combat firefighters who can fight wildfires and house fires, we have some who are emergency medical services, and we have others that offer support services for the emergency scene as well as community education,” Kytta said.

The department is recovering from a staffing shortage that began in 2014 after a reduction of assessed property value in its coverage area reduced Riverside's annual revenue, leading the department to eliminate eight paid firefighter positions.

Riverside didn’t replace any of those firefighters until earlier this year when it received a FEMA grant to hire four firefighter-EMTs. As part of the grant, FEMA will reimburse 100% of the cost of the firefighters’ first year of employment.

“We didn’t apply for the grant until we could do a financial forecast that told us that we would have the funds available when the grant sunsets to keep those personnel on staff,” Kytta said.

“We’re almost back up to where we were in 2014, but we learned an awful lot along the way with that reduction in staff that made us more efficient, but now our call volume is continuing to increase so it’s hard to be highly reliable with too low of a staffing level, but our situation has improved.”

Riverside typically has an annual volunteer turnover of 5 to 10%, Kytta said; but the fire department’s main staffing challenge is keeping up with retirement. A third of Riverside’s combined full-time and volunteer firefighters are eligible for retirement within the next five to seven years and another third currently has less than five years of experience.

“We’re very much so an organization that’s in transition and working quite hard to make sure that succession planning is appropriate and we will be able to match the demand for service on our volunteer side,” Kytta said.

Riverside is waiting to hear back about another grant that would aid it in recruiting and retaining volunteer personnel. If they get the grant, Kytta said Riverside’s goal would be to recruit 30 volunteers over the four-year grant period for both the scheduled volunteer program and a new residential volunteer program.

Volunteer firefighters supplement the paid volunteer firefighters on the shift roster, and are often the ones responding to rural calls, he said.

“So it’s trying to have a balance between our full time personnel and our volunteer personnel, much of which is driven by economics, the ability of the community to pay for full time folks,” Kytta said. “We strive for a balance between the two because it gives us access to more resources with the volunteer personnel at relatively low cost and keeps us within our budget … through that balance, we’re able to provide a very reliable, consistent service to the communities that we serve.”