WILLISTON — When the emergency alarm went off on a Friday night earlier this month, all three on-duty Williston firefighters jumped into action.
A critically ill patient needing immediate attention had called in, requiring a transfer to the UVM Medical Center emergency room, 15 minutes away in Burlington.
Because the urgent situation needed all hands on deck, they had to leave the station abandoned.
Fire and EMS Chief Aaron Collette, who was on duty at the time, put out a plea to his small team of on-call firefighters, asking for someone to come in and man the station. No one responded.
The station was left empty for 45 minutes to an hour, Collette said. If another Williston resident had needed immediate aid, no one would have been around to respond.
“That’s how bad it is,” Collette said of the Williston emergency responder staff shortage, speaking at the town selectboard’s meeting Nov. 16.
The severe shortage of Williston firefighters, emergency medical technicians and paramedics means longer waits and cuts in services for 911 callers, especially if calls arrive at the same time. The situation in this Burlington suburb of just over 10,000 residents is reflected across Vermont. According to experts in the field, emergency service providers around the state are struggling to fill their ranks, and the results include slower emergency responses and worries about public safety.
“When a citizen calls 911, they expect someone to show up and, as of late, concurrent calls seem to be increasing and we don’t have the depth to be able to answer all of those calls,” said Collette, describing the issue in Williston.
New trucks, no staff
Williston’s emergency responder shortage is not new. But the severity of the problem was recently brought to light by two events.
At a total cost of $1.4 million, the town recently took delivery of two new fire trucks that, at this point, it does not have the ability to staff. In addition, a recent report commissioned by the town highlighted the public health risk of an insufficient number of emergency responders.
The Williston Fire Department’s “current staffing levels cannot meet the necessary performance objectives to provide an effective response force for firefighting operations,” the report by public safety consulting firm AP Triton concluded.
Williston has 1.18 full-time emergency responders per 1,000 people, according to the Triton report. The national average is 1.8 career emergency responders per 1,000 people. For on-call staff — community volunteers who get paid hourly to jump on board when they are available — Williston has 0.99 responders per 1,000 people. The national average is 5.8.
AP Triton recommended the department immediately hire an additional nine full-time staff members to meet current demand.
The Williston Fire Department has grown over the years. But it hasn’t kept up with the increasing needs of the community.
“It used to be just two people per shift; now it’s four, but we’re so busy, four people isn’t even close to enough,” said Lt. Sean Soper, who has been with Williston Fire for 15 years.
The department responded to almost 2,000 calls in 2020, up from around 1,600 in 2011. EMS calls played the biggest role in the increase, making up 59% of the 2020 calls. Of those calls, about 21% were concurrent, according to a fire department report. That spread Williston’s small team very thin, sometimes leaving responders to handle complex incidents, such as highway crashes or critically ill patients, by themselves.
Williston Fire’s full-time staff is supposed to be bolstered by on-call responders, but the number of on-call staff has fallen dramatically over the past few years — from 30 in 2016 to eight this year, according to Collette.
Collette couldn’t put his finger on the primary cause of the emergency responder shortage in Williston, and said it’s likely a combination of things.
“Everyone has their own story,” he said, referring to the recent departure of a longtime on-call staff member who had to step down because of health issues.
Pay, training, exhaustion
However, Collette did offer some theories about the difficulty in recruiting on-call staff. Among them: low pay, as the job starts at minimum wage; the hundreds of hours of training required to get started; Covid exhaustion; and the time commitment. All those factors make the job a hard sell to someone who already has a full-time job and other priorities, he said.
Peter Lynch, chief of training at the Vermont Fire Academy, pointed to many of the same issues statewide.
“With few exceptions, the theme of any meeting I attend is that we don’t have the staff, the volunteers that we once did and it’s terribly difficult some days to handle emergencies appropriately,” he said.
The extent of this issue is particularly concerning because emergency response services around Vermont work together through mutual aid, a system where emergency response teams lend a hand across jurisdictional boundaries when needed. But that system is rooted in the idea that neighboring departments will have a hand to lend.
Even so, relying heavily on mutual aid is less than an ideal situation, according to emergency response experts and Williston town leaders.
“Mutual aid doesn’t respond as quickly as an in-town service,” said Terry Macaig, Williston’s selectboard chair. “Service may be coming from Essex or South Burlington and they have limited capacity, too, to give mutual aid, so we need to see how we can best provide service within the town.”
The selectboard has given Collette the go-ahead to start advertising nine open positions, as recommended by AP Triton. The addition would significantly expand the emergency response team from 12 to 21 personnel.
Adding nine responders to the team would cost the town just under $800,000 a year, significantly increasing the cost of running the Williston Fire Department — from around $2.25 million to $3 million per year. Despite the high cost, town and department leaders say the move is necessary to keep Williston residents and visitors safe. In addition, board members hope at least some of the expense will be covered by grant money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
With the additional staff, Collette said he hopes the department can start moving in a more sustainable direction. He said he would like to hire the nine staffers by April and have them on the ground by June.
However, he acknowledged the hiring process may prove difficult.
Around the country, fire departments are competing for the same pool of people. Additionally, the national labor shortage, which is particularly severe in Vermont, doesn’t bode well for expeditious hiring.
“We have the blessing to go forward and start advertising for new positions,” Collette said. “But I’m apprehensive about what we will see. We will probably encounter a small pool of qualified candidates.”
Clarification: The headline for this story has been updated to more precisely describe the impact of the emergency worker shortage.
