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Fire alarm: The volunteers

With volunteers scarce and demands increasing, LI fire agencies are turning to paid employees to answer the alarms

BY ELIZABETH MOORE | STAFF WRITER

November 17, 2005

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In the fall of 2003, a longtime Manhasset volunteer firefighter and businessman placed a startling advertisement in the local newspaper.

"Volunteerism has been stretched to the breaking point," wrote Brian Kenny, a volunteer since 1960. It was time, he argued, to "get past the emotional trap of tradition and brotherhood," time for the Manhasset-Lakeville Fire District to start hiring firefighters and paramedics.

The ad sparked outrage and denunciations from volunteers.

But, the truth was, department members it had hired to maintain its firehouses were already being sent on calls when too few volunteers showed up.

It's just another example of how Long Island's volunteer fire service is becoming a little less volunteer every day. Payroll, civil service and alarm records confirm what many firefighters have been saying: Fire agencies in Nassau and Suffolk are hiring ever-growing numbers of employees to do jobs volunteers once did.

Most fire employees are paid to mop the floor, open the mail and tend the trucks. But, officially or not, many now also are expected to handle the volunteers' core firefighting and medical duties if needed, getting around civil service rules.

At least 19 agencies also are now officially hiring paid emergency medical technicians because they admit that their members can't keep up with the demands on them.

Today, Long Island fire agencies employ at least 1,800 people, an average of 10 full- and part-time workers for each fire agency, at a cost of more than $52 million annually. Their numbers are small next to the 20,000 volunteers in Nassau and Suffolk, but they are becoming indispensable. Only one in six fire agencies still function as purely volunteer organizations with no paid staff.

From the Nassau-Queens border to East End beach communities, firehouse sign boards carry the same plaintive message these days: "Volunteers Needed."

Neither the wellspring of support for firefighters everywhere after the Sept. 11 attacks nor vigorous public-service ad campaigns seeking new recruits have done much to increase volunteer ranks, especially in more affluent fire districts where the high cost of homes has driven out young, would-be volunteers. The rise in two-income and commuter families also has changed the equation.

"I had two kids within my first year of marriage -- I was working overtime, and my wife was working, so I had to care for the kids while she was at work," said Michael Benfante, 34, a former North Patchogue firefighter, explaining why he quit recently. "So there really wasn't much time."

A shifting landscape

In Manhasset, a committee appointed by the district as a result of Kenny's ad later acknowledged a weekday volunteer shortage and urged hiring a "nucleus" of firefighters and emergency medical technicians to fill the gap. The committee even had the idea that the paid custodians now stationed in each of the five firehouses, who already answered some fire and medical calls, should instead be clustered in one firehouse each weekday.

"If there's a fire, they have a full truck complement right there," said Paul Early, the chairman. The district took that advice, and custodians who are firefighters now roll together on calls.

Officials in other districts across Long Island also are struggling to negotiate a shifting landscape, patching together reliable protection with a crazy-quilt of hiring while at the same time trying to preserve the "all-volunteer" system and its traditions.

"There's no contradiction there at all," said Frank Nocerino, treasurer of the state fire districts' association and a North Massapequa commissioner.

He said whenever any of North Massapequa's six employees answers a call, "they have to punch out and then they've got to punch back in ... We're hiring people because we've got work to do. We've got to keep up the grounds, the electrical, the mechanical."

In 2001 Terryville commissioners made no bones about why they were hiring a dozen custodians; they were there to answer medical calls when needed. Commissioners brushed off volunteers' complaints that this would be a fatal blow to their morale.

"This ain't the Moose or the Elks, this is to protect life and property," Terryville Chairman William Theis said then. "They weren't coming out."

Theis said he now believes it's time to start hiring firefighters, too.