It’s well known that volunteer fire departments have been dwindling for years due to a dramatic drop in people willing to volunteer their time.
This article lays out the 90 percent drop in volunteers in Pennsylvania since the 1970s. People just don’t have the sense of community that they once had.
2 Comments
Tom235 · November 19, 2024 at 8:25 am
Having been there, done that, got the T-shirt – volunteering for a FD or EMS is a tremendous drain on time in order to do it properly. Add to that the ever-reaching fingers of govt bureaucracy even into volunteers, it gets to the point of Why bother? Not that I’m dissing those that do volunteer or even those that don’t. But come the time “the public” needs those services, the bitching and moaning about the lack is almost as loud as the bitching and moaning about raising taxes to provide those as “professional” services.
TRX · November 19, 2024 at 9:23 am
I knew a guy who had been with a local VFD for thirty years. The was sad and angry because they were shutting down.
He said “organizers” came in, mostly from out-of-state, and gave presentations to legislators as to how the VFDs were poorly regulated, and their equipment and training was substandard by comparison to big-city departments. In due course, the legislature addressed this by establishing minimum training and equipment requirements for VFDs.
The VFDs operated by public subscription. The extra training and equipment were expensive. Past some point, homeowners were unwilling to cough up the money out of their own pockets. So, without enough money to meet the requirements the VFDs began shutting down. Their role was taken over by city departments, who got contracts to serve surrounding areas, and new county FDs.