Finding and retaining volunteer fire fighters is becoming more challenging for rural communities such as Lantzville, its fire chief says.
Rob Chatton, District of Lantzville Fire Rescue chief, said two volunteers had to leave the department this year because they could no longer afford to live in the community.
Chatton will try to fill those vacancies with volunteers from Lantzville, but with a smaller and older population, the department may be forced to look at neighbouring communities, which isn’t ideal.
“Lantzville is a small community, so there is only so much available and what that means is if we can’t get people that are right here, then we are having to look a little further on the outskirts,” he said.
The department has 26 paid on-call volunteers who generally commit between 20 to 30 hours per month, which consist of weekly training sessions and other commitments.
Chatton says it would be nice to have 30 volunteers, but with busier work weeks and rising cost of living, it’s becoming harder to attract new volunteers.
Although Nanaimo has more than 90,000 people, Chatton says it isn’t smart to recruit from outside of Lantzville or north Nanaimo because they would be too far away to respond to calls.
“Obviously we want to get to the station as fast as we can. In order to do that, we want to have people who live right in the community,” he said.
Declining volunteers and retention issues are not unique to Lantzville, says Chatton, who was once assistant fire chief in Pitt Meadows.
“This is something we’ve been talking about for over a decade. Getting people in the door and getting them to stay there is getting harder and harder. Large communities are having that same problem. Look at Pitt Meadows or Maple Ridge where they have paid on-call members, they face the same issue because of the cost of housing,” he said.
The problem of declining volunteer firefighters is widespread across North America.
According to Kimberly Quiros, spokeswoman for National Volunteer Fire Council, a non-profit representing U.S. volunteer firefighters, Lantzville’s issues are very similar to what many other departments are facing in America.
She says some American departments near post-secondary campuses offer live-in programs in exchange a certain amount of volunteer hours per week, while some have a Length of Service Award program.
“Those are almost like retirement benefits. The longer a volunteer serves, the more they are putting away into this retirement savings program,” she said. “A lot of departments are trying different methods to attract people.”
Chatton says some departments in Canada have tried other methods, such as a duty roster, which pays volunteers to be at the hall and respond to calls, while others use an apprentice-type model.
“Departments will provide a crew of four people accommodations in the fire hall and the expectations are that in the daytime they are going to be able to respond to the calls and then in the evening and the weekends when the paid on-call members have more availability, those people might go and work at a job,” he said. “But in the meantime, they are provided the accommodation and the experience of being in a department and that in turn will help them get hired.”
While having more affordable housing might have prevented the loss of members, Chatton says affordable housing for younger families might not be enough.
“It’s tough,” Chatton said.
