Why the drop in volunteers signing up to be Shasta County Fire Department firefighters?

As John Parrish marks his 50th year as a volunteer firefighter, the 83-year-old is doing it all alone as the last remaining member of the Old Station Fire Department.

When a fire call comes into the tiny eastern Shasta County community of Old Station, Parrish is the only one available at the fire department to answer the call. He doesn’t go on medical calls, do initial attack or cut containment line on wildland fires anymore.

Those days are over for him. But he can still drive a tanker truck out to fires to provide water to other fire engines.

“I probably would have quit a long time ago, except it's down to nobody and I started to think, so it's kind of hard to walk away from,” Parrish said.

Old Station is part of the Shasta County Fire Department, which has 21 fire stations in 17 communities. The county needs about 250 people to be fully staffed, but was running with about half the number of volunteers it needs, said John Kiszka, a California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection assistant chief out of the Redding office.

But Old Station is far from alone among fire stations starved for volunteers, with hundreds of departments across the country dealing with a shortage of people willing or able to freely give their time.

The volunteer shortage worries county Supervisor Tim Garman.

“If it continues and everything is turned over to Cal Fire and the county, they're not going to be able to keep all the firefighting stations open, the way it's going,” Garman said.

Kiszka said Cal Fire, which runs the county fire department, actively recruits for volunteers on social media and at local events. But getting people to join their local fire department is difficult.

“It's not just a local problem. It's a statewide, if not nationwide problem,” he said. He said the department needs a public information officer to help recruit volunteers.

When a structure fire breaks out, it’s a local problem. If a home catches fire in Old Station, the nearest volunteer station is in Hat Creek, about 15 minutes down the road, Kiszka said. There is a Cal Fire station in Burney, 24 miles away and a Cal Fire Station in Shingletown, 28 miles away, he said.

There is a Lassen National Forest fire engine crew at the Old Station work center, which would in the summer “probably send an engine if it is staffed and available to protect the potential spread to the wildland,” Kiszka said.

A U.S. Forest Service crew would respond to a fire in Old Station after a request for mutual aid from “the responsible agency,” said Amber Marshall, a spokeswoman for the Lassen National Forest. She referred further questions to Cal Fire.

The drop in volunteers, like what has happened in Old Station, reflects changes in society over the past several decades, said Marty Creel, a volunteer firefighter in a small, rural community in Sutter County. He is also executive director of the California State Firefighters Association.

“I believe one of the reasons is that it's a lack of community, when we're all detached, with social media and all of those things. I don't know if it's generally a generational issue or what the change has been in society, but there just isn't as high of a sense of volunteerism as there used to be,” Creel said.

About two-thirds of volunteer fire companies nationwide struggle with retention, according to the National Volunteer Fire Council.

Where people live and work has also contributed to the difficulty in recruiting new volunteers, Creel said. Decades ago, it was more common for residents to work in the communities where they lived. Employers back then also were more likely to let employees leave work to go fight a fire in their community, he said.

Firefighters must also complete more training than they did 40 or 50 years ago.

“Back then, with the volunteers, if you could breathe you could be on the department,” Parrish said. Today’s standards and training requirements are much higher, he said.

The time commitment can be prohibitive for many people, Kiszka said.

“There has been a significant increase in the amount of training hours that volunteer firefighters have to do every year. There are the commitments of these people that have regular lives, regular day jobs and then to try to respond to calls; when they have very little time to themselves and or family, it’s very difficult,” he said.

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Fire department Chief Sean O'Hara echoed that finding during a budget hearing before the county Board of Supervisors in June.

"Volunteerism is dying," O'Hara said.

Smaller communities tend to use more volunteers than larger towns, Creel said. In California, there are 242 all-volunteer fire companies, he said, citing statistics from the National Fire Department Registry.

All-volunteer stations comprise about 28% of all fire companies in the state, while fire departments with all-paid, professional staff make up about 29% of the units. The remainder of the departments statewide are composed of a mix of volunteers and paid staff.

Kiszka said the volunteer stations in the county are essential to fighting wildland and structure fires in their communities.

There are several other fire departments in the county that are not part of the Shasta County Fire Department. Those include such agencies as Shasta Lake Fire Protection District, Mountain Gate Fire Protection District, Cottonwood Fire Protection District and Burney Fire Protection District.

The Shasta Community Services District has a fire company, but volunteers are interested in splitting it off into its own separate district, said Eric Ohde, the fire chief there.

Don Chaix, chief at the Cassel Fire Department, said volunteers need to keep up 72 hours of training annually. They usually meet twice a month for three-hour training sessions, he said. Not everyone can carve that much time out of their routine or get time off work and hop on a fire truck to go put out fires, he said.

“Because people don't have the time anymore to do it. It's not like the old days, where you could just come here. You got to train and do all the stuff. When I started 40 years ago, one household member had work. I was fortunate. I was a caretaker and I was able to break away from my job. But when you got both family members working, it's tough to do it. And then it's all the time it takes to do it. People just don't want to do it anymore,” he said.

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French Gulch Fire Department Chief Cliff Shattuck said six of the seven volunteers in his department received letters earlier this year from Shasta County Fire Department Chief Sean O’Hara informing them they had been placed on probation for not keeping up with the required training and not going on enough emergency calls.

He said he supports proper instruction, but enforcing the training rule could make recruiting and retention more challenging.

“The county is lucky to have them (volunteers) and they have been a very cost effective resource in the past. It is hard to imagine the rationale of dismissing volunteers when it is so hard to get them,” Shattuck said in a letter to Garman.

Chaix said two of the five volunteers in his department received the probation letters.

While Kiszka said Cal Fire believes volunteers are essential and the agency works to recruit and retain them, there are some who feel the state would rather see the small fire companies around the county just would go away.

Larry Russell, a former fire chief and volunteer in Shasta County for 44 years, said he has seen Cal Fire push out local fire departments before.

“They say, 'well, let us help you. And we'll bring in a station and we'll put it right in your district.' Palo Cedro is a prime example. Well, as soon as they do that, and they start making fire calls. Do you think that the volunteer that's going to have to go to work at 5 o'clock in the morning is going to get up at 2 o'clock and go do it? No, and they know this. So slowly, it just goes away,” said Russell, who also serves on the county Local Agency Formation Commission.

A person who answered the phone at the Palo Cedro fire department referred questions to the Cal Fire main headquarters in Redding.

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Except for the cost of building a new fire station in Anderson last year, county spending in the fire department has remained flat, according to the county budget. County fire department spending was $6.9 million last year. The county’s proposed budget for the coming year was $6.1 million, a 17% decrease in spending from the previous year.

The U.S. Fire Administration says volunteers cost about $45,000 less per firefighter than paid employees. And volunteer firefighters save the public about $37 billion annually nationwide, according to the fire administration.

The county fire department is managed as a special district called a “community service area,” Kiszka said. The county has considered dissolving the CSA and placing the county fire department in the county general fund.

The move would make the fire department eligible for state sales tax money set aside for public safety, Kiszka said.

“It would not decrease any of the volunteer fire stations in the county fire department, but could have the ability to better fund the department into the future,” Kiszka said.

Keswick was the last fire station in the county department to close, he said. The station burned down in the 2018 Carr Fire and was not rebuilt because there was a Cal Fire station nearby.

And there are no plans to close any stations within the next five years, he said.

“However, the number of volunteers continues to decline, which is an issue across the country. The goal is to continue to fund all of the stations and continue to find ways bolster volunteers to provide continued service to the county,” Kiszka said.

Reporter Damon Arthur welcomes story tips at 530-338-8834, by email at damon.arthur@redding.com and on Twitter at @damonarthur_RS. Help local journalism thrive by subscribing today!

This article originally appeared on Redding Record Searchlight: 'Volunteerism is dying' as Shasta County Fire Department struggles