'If you call, someone's going to come'

May 28—BREMEN — On the first Monday of every month, a dozen or so people in the Cold Springs community file into the small garage response center that serves as the headquarters for the area's volunteer firefighting department. Some of them are retired; some of them have day jobs, and one or two — still in their teens — may even be full-time students at the county school just a stone's throw away.

But one thing they all have in common is a shared belief in being there for the unincorporated community they call home — even though none of them makes a dime of money in compensation for their service.

"If you could just paint us as everyday people who want to help, that would be great!" jokes Shelly Williams, an EMT-trained volunteer who's been with the department for 14 years. Judging by the group's obvious camaraderie inside the garage's tidy, but appropriately used and abused meeting space, it's a point that any first-time guests would hardly need persuading to figure out for themselves.

Year in and year out, local people coming together — often without much of an audience to bear witness to the extra hours they're devoting to their community — marks a pattern that repeats across Cullman County, whose rural emergency response backbone largely consists of unpaid volunteers. Some have basic or even advanced medical first-response training; others aren't trained at all. Several are there just to provide general support, in whatever auxiliary way they can.

"Not everybody is dragging a hose or carrying a backboard," says Williams, who commutes during the week to Sumiton to her day job as an office manager and dental hygienist. "You've got to have backup people; you can't do it without them. 'Can you go back to the station and grab a pallet of water?' — that kind of thing. and you have to have someone you can go home and talk to. You've got to have someone who's at home, cooking for the kids. Every role matters. That's part of the whole 'It takes a community' idea of having a volunteer fire department."

Casual observers may hear "volunteer fire department" and naturally imagine that fighting fires is what department members do. But while fire response is vital, it's only a small part of what goes into the job. Medical calls, car accidents, missing persons, and more are all part of jumble of calls that Cold Springs and other departments receive on a daily basis.

Through mid-May, the department had already received 28 calls — "and most of those were medical," says Larry Curd, a retired truck driver who joined up after moving to Cold Springs a few years ago. "We're 'overly blessed' with traffic accidents out this way, so we get a lot of those calls, too."

Larry may be a relative newcomer to the department's current 20-person roster, but he's already treated like family by the others — most of whom, like fire chief Bobby Garmon, Sr., have been in the area for decades. Family, in fact, is almost synonymous with "community" in a place as small, close-knit, and relatively isolated as Cold Springs.

"My pawpaw was here when the department started. Then my dad was here for 10 or 15 years. Now I'm here," jokes Hayden Ham, a six-year volunteer who farms a little at his home just down the road when he isn't at his day job at nearby GSI AGCO.

Volunteer fire fighters hew to the same rhythms of daily life as everyone else at Cold Springs. "When we get toned out for a call, we may be coming from the grocery store. When (son) Cameron was younger, he'd be with us in the car, and we'd get a call. Well, he's got to go with us because we're going straight to the scene — but 'you have to stay in the car,' we'd tell him. It all happens in the middle of what you might be doing, but you're all still together as it's happening. There's a lot of hands-on to doing this, and that's where the family side of it comes in."

Though no volunteers are paid, it costs significant money to run even a small volunteer response unit. Like other area VFDs, Cold Springs is working with a mix-and-match jumble of equipment that ranges from gently used to downright archaic. There're two fire engines, one tanker, an ambulance, a rescue truck, and two brush trucks. "Honestly, a couple of those are probably close to 40 years old," says Ham.

More often than not, something needs fixing, a task that falls to mechanically-minded volunteers like Darell Williams, Shelly's husband and, by day, a mechanic at the Cullman County Sanitation Department. He doesn't mind, though: "I just enjoy cutting up cars," he teases. "I have a body shop at home, so it's something I know how to do. Everybody works together to do what they know. and except for a few people who've moved here in just the past few years, people definitely already know each other. It kind of just flows together."

The department gets by on fire dues, which are opt-in payments that residents within its 44 square-mile coverage area can elect to be charged on their monthly utility bills. Dues are $6 per month, and Williams says there are 1,020 accounts — from single-family homes to manufacturing facilities like AGCO and Hired Hand — that currently pay in.

Another 169 accounts, adds Williams, had opted out of the program as of last fall. She admits that part can be a little disheartening. "It's frustrating when people in the community opt out of paying their fire dues, because every little bit helps," she says. "But we try to be good stewards of what we do have, and use it to serve our community."

Plus, as Curd crucially notes, opting in has no bearing on whether the volunteer fire department will respond to your emergency. "We answer no matter who's paying dues," he says. "In fact, most of the time we're not even aware of something like that when we get a call. If someone has a $2.5 million house on the lake, that's us. If it's a brush fire on the side of the road, that's us, too. It doesn't matter who you are: If you call, someone's going to come."