First Posted: 9/3/2014
Local fire and emergency medical service (EMS) officials are seeing a drop in volunteers due to various reasons, but the lack in personnel affects the community all the same.
Wyoming Hose Company No. 2 Chief Tony Yurek has been part of the fire department for over 35 years and has watched the department’s volunteer numbers dwindle throughout that time.
“We once had 30 to 40 active members and now we’re running around with eight to 10, eight to 15 members every year,” said Yurek. “We’ve been putting it out every year once a year for the last eight or 10 years that we’ve needed volunteers, and we’ve had not too many respond to it.”
Joe Kopcza III, president of the Wyoming Ambulance, which is part of Wyoming Hose Company No. 1, said it’s equally difficult to find EMS volunteers.
Kopcza said it’s no longer a world in which volunteers have a significant amount of time on their hands.
“We as an ambulance, we run the Wyoming Ambulance and we have tried to help with the volunteerism,” said Kopcza. “The thing is people have to be with their families, go to school, take separate classes on being a volunteer, but with their training demands, it’s too hard on them and we try to help out.”
Volunteer work often involves being on call at certain hours of the day or night, ready to respond to any given situation.
Cheryl Butera, president of West Pittston Community Ambulance, agreed that people just don’t have as much time to spare.
“People don’t have the time. Back in the day, you didn’t need to go to training and you just picked someone up,” said Butera. “Now you need to go for an ‘X’ amount of hours of training and keeping things up. Some don’t pay for training, so it’s not just as a volunteer just hearing the pager, there’s other things involved now. You have to keep your CPR (certification) up to date and different licensing. It’s more involved than 25 years ago. With sports and things, people just don’t have the time to devote to this anymore.”
Butera said the lack of volunteers is having a negative impact on organizations in terms of manpower and money. She said without volunteers, it can be much more difficult to respond to one call, let alone to multiple calls.
“About 20 years ago, people went to a paid duty crew and it’s not like that anymore; you can’t afford it. You might have a paid crew for eight to 12 hours, but you need the volunteers to pick up the difference and that’s how it generates money, so if a volunteer takes a cal,l it’s more money,” said Butera. “Volunteers would help every single town maintain call volume, and the money would be directed to their organization. If you don’t have volunteers, but the town next to you does and they get a call at 3 a.m. the money goes to them. Unfortunately, it’s a business anymore. It’s sad that it is, but it’s the way the world works.”
Butera suggested a merger with Wyoming Ambulance, saying she hopes to have something done to help accommodate for the lack of help either side is receiving.
“I approached Joe last summer about merging. We’re trying to move forward with this merger because we can’t have the duplication of services,” said Butera. “Ambulances run about $2,000 and how do you support that with declining revenue and no volunteers? This is the way to go and it’s happening across the state. Lancaster has merged with five different towns over the years and you can apply for larger grants that way and there are a lot of bonuses to doing that. You can use it on calls for both towns and all the better. So, that’s where we’re at right now.”
One aspect believed to have been forgotten, according to Butera, is the satisfaction that comes to saving the lives within the community.
She hopes there are volunteers out there wanting to help and encourages them do so in the near future.
“I think that (a potential volunteer) wouldn’t know the rewards to doing something like (this) unless they actually did it,” she said. “There’s a great reward in doing this job beyond the money. I think there’s great reward in it and I think they should at least give it a try.”
