For a long time, the St. Johnsbury Fire Department had few problems filling its 25-volunteer roster.
Now, it has only six on-call members.
“They’re working harder. They’re exerting themselves harder. Their psychological and physical stress is much higher,” Fire Chief Jon Bouffard said. “There’s less likelihood that they’re going to be in a safe environment because they’re not going to have the people there to cover their rears.”
The decline in firefighters in Caledonia and Essex counties — particularly on-call staff — has sparked talks of regionalizing fire services in the area over the past two years.
St. Johnsbury and Waterford received a $31,000 grant in December 2019 to study the feasibility of a regional firefighting setup. Barnet, Concord, Danville, Groton and Lyndon all signed on to participate, too.
The results of the research, released in April, supported the idea of sharing services across the region through a hub-and-spoke model as a way to combat staffing shortages. The report’s suggested approach would come with an estimated price tag of $1.57 million.
The staffing situation in the seven Northeast Kingdom towns is believed to be “on the verge of becoming a very visible crisis … as responders age out and a lack of operational capability becomes more evident,” according to the study.
North of St. Johnsbury, in Lyndonville, Fire Chief Jeff Corrow said his paid, on-call crew of 37 members is at its highest total ever.
“But again, it’s not enough,” he said. “Because realistically, if you have a roster of 37, you might get a handful of people to show up.”
He said he would take another 37 people on top of his total “just because it takes that amount of people to do what is asked of the fire service of today’s world.”
His firefighters get called for horses stuck in mud, water rescues, car crashes and more. And because the Lyndonville Fire Department has the capability to get a lot of firefighters on a truck or two, it is often called to help with emergencies in other towns, Corrow said.
His biggest concern is getting a truck on the road during the daytime with more than two crew members on it — the proper amount, he said.
Because everyone in his department is on call, many are not able to respond during the day because of their work or family obligations, he said.
Bouffard said his department faces the same challenge with on-call members. The lack of volunteers means that crews responding to fires or accidents are bearing a greater burden — which wears them down faster.
National standards say 17 firefighters should respond to a fire at a typical single-family home. When one such house fire happened on Spring Street in December, the department was able to get only six firefighters there, Bouffard said.
“At the end of the day, those six guys are working three times as hard as they should be,” he said.
The impact from shortages multiplies: Firefighters doing more work than they’re supposed to means greater exposure to heat and greater exhaustion, the chief said. Add that to their responsibilities outside of volunteering for fire service, and it takes a toll.
“And I think that our communities are starting to see the toll in seeing less and less [firefighters] show up,” Bouffard said. “It’s a cyclic problem … you can’t just make more firefighters come out of the woodwork.”
His biggest worry is the potential of a major structure fire happening in town.
“In the end, from a services perspective, at some point it's going to get to a point where we can’t provide the service,” he said. “What do you do then if you call for a fire truck and the fire truck doesn't show up? What do you do?”
The call might go down the line from town to town, until a department three towns over is able to respond. But by then, he said, it might be too late.
Volunteer recruitment can be a challenge because it takes hundreds of hours of training to meet the requirements to serve, a total that has climbed over the years, the chiefs said. Both highlighted a particular struggle: The pool of potential staff members is shallow and shrinking.
The study described the costs associated with the consortium towns’ “rapidly diminishing staffing pool for fire operations, part of a nationwide trend, as the biggest challenge ahead for all the stakeholders.”
The pool of people interested are either very young or older folks with free time, Bouffard said. “Picking from either of those ends, it’s slim,” he said.
Both chiefs approve of the study results and think regionalization will help address their concerns. Pooling each department’s available staff would make it much easier to achieve best-practice standards and safely staff emergencies, Bouffard said.
Corrow said the study, and his neighbors’ willingness to take part in it, shows that area fire officials are ready to make a change.
“Doing something is better than doing nothing, which we have been doing since I’ve been in the fire service,” the 30-year firefighter said.
“I'm hoping there might be some light at the end of the tunnel,” Corrow said.
