Stowe fire and EMS teams look to boost ranks

“We want people to kind of see what they’re getting into and understand what it is,” fire chief Scott Reeves said. “It’s a commitment, if you’re going to do it right.”

Reeves was speaking Saturday during an open house at the Stowe public safety building, part of a statewide recruitment initiative at firehouses all over the state known as Mayday.

Reeves said being a firefighter doesn’t mean one must actually go into a burning building, nor does being on the emergency medical services squad always mean performing CPR or administering Narcan or inserting a breathing tube — the squads need technicians, drivers and people to run logistics, too.

However, it all requires hundreds of hours of training. And there’s continuous work every so often to become re-certified. The time commitment is the only expense, though. Reeves said the departments pay for the training and they have officers who are also certified to perform much of the training in-house.

Scott Brinkman, Stowe EMS chief, said another hurdle to recruitment is the same one countless people encounter simply trying to live in Vermont — the dearth of places to live. He said one of the advanced EMTs on the squad was living in an apartment about a two-minute walk from the public safety building, but her landlord decided to turn her place and others into Airbnbs.

“She scrambled to find a place to be able to stay in town and continue being a responder,” Brinkman said. “She found one, sure. For $1,800 a month.”

Junior squad

One of the few people who visited the open house in the first hour or so of the Mayday event was Leocadia Clark, who grew up in town.

Clark, a former Stowe High School student who just finished her junior year at Norwich University, said she’s got a busy senior year ahead of her — both with studies and as a starting goalie for the Cadets hockey team — so it’ll be difficult to get the hundreds of hours of training necessary to be a full-fledged firefighter.

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to work it all in, so maybe I’ll get as much done over the summer, and hopefully try to figure it out during the school year,” she said.

Clark said she knows people on the fire department or recognizes others from having grown up in town. She said she had planned on joining the junior squad her senior year, but she ended up going to Rice Academy to concentrate on hockey.

As an athlete, Clark said she’s most excited about the physical aspects of being a firefighter — the heavy equipment, the sweat and smoke and water, the adrenaline rush.

“I would hope that if I’m in shape enough for hockey, I’m in shape enough for this,” she said.

Reeves said the fire department has a junior program, a partnership with Stowe High School where students 16 and older join the squad and perform limited duties but get to experience what it’s like. However, Reeves said there are not any teens currently on the squad and an email sent out to Stowe High kids last year didn’t elicit any interest.

“Which was kind of a shame, because I know when I joined the department 17 years ago, we had, like, 12 juniors,” Reeves said. “I’m kind of bummed that we didn’t get a good turnout but, you know, maybe it’s not the cool thing for kids to do anymore.”

He said the program is a win-win for the department and the teens. On the one hand, younger volunteers are part of a structured team and often “come out of their shells” in that type of environment.

At the same time, they are extra sets of hands on the ground. Even though the junior squad members would not come along to the most dangerous, gnarly scenes of destruction, they can be invaluable with necessary tasks that would otherwise preoccupy a more experienced firefighter, like running hoses or fetching equipment, or spotting for trouble.

“Obviously, we can’t have the kids go into a burning building,” Reeves said. “But if I can have a junior that knows where the vent fan is and bring the vent fan to the front door, then I’m not tying up an interior firefighter to do that. It’s a great opportunity for us to utilize our resources better.”

By the numbers

Stowe Fire Department has 25 people on its roster, a far cry from the 45 or so on the crew nearly two decades ago. Reeves would like to see membership in the mid-30s, because even though fewer people are available when the alarm sounds, that alarm has been sounding more than ever.

The department went on 449 calls last year, which Reeves said is a record. That included everything from odor investigations and false alarms to fully involved structure fires and automobile extrications.

“We’re tracking at a greater pace this year already, year to date,” he said, saying there have been 18 more calls so far this year than at the same time last year. “It’s not even getting into our busy time, which is the summer and fall.”

Of the 25 members on the fire department, only a portion of them regularly come out on routine calls, and Reeves does not begrudge them that, recognizing people have full-time jobs or kids and other commitments.

“We’re covering at the minimum level right now,” he said. “But, when we do have a big event, I will say the rest of the volunteers generally show up.”

Cross training

Brinkman said Stowe EMS currently has four full-time workers and 25 per-diem volunteers, and he’d like to see the latter up to 30. But the thing about the Stowe fire and EMS squads is if you join one, you join both.

Stowe has evolved its first response model to make up for dwindling levels of volunteerism by cross training full time emergency medical services members to be able to fight fires, and vice versa.

“We call it responding to the emergency at hand,” Brinkman said.

He said the four full-time EMS workers have all gone through fire training, so if the fire alarm goes off, anyone can hop on the fire truck. He said when the fire department brought two new people last year, they were required to also get EMS certifications.

“If there’s three or four people in the building, we all go. There’s always a door to be held or something brought in from the truck,” he said. “If you only need two people to transport, you leave two in town and they take the next call, or they respond to the next fire alarm, or whatever.”