Call firefighters in demand in some South Shore communities

When the fire whistle sounds, Chris Donahue of Whitman drops his tools and heads out.

Depending on the call, the 19-year-old may respond to the Whitman fire station, just 1.5 miles from his job at Four Seasons Power Equipment on Route 18, or to a fire scene.

Donahue is a call firefighter, one of 11 Whitman Fire Chief Timothy Travers relies on to supplement the five "career" firefighters who are on duty at any given time.

"I'm doing it for the experience," said Donahue, who hopes to some day be a career firefighter.

Call firefighters are traditional in small communities, but some, such as Abington and Plymouth, have moved on to fully staffed departments and others, including Carver and Plympton, remain call departments, save for a chief and perhaps a deputy.

Now, some departments are struggling to fill the call positions.

"We're way down," said Wareham Fire Chief Robert McDuffy, who plans to send firefighters and apparatus to key locations in town to recruit call firefighters.

Travers, the Whitman chief, is making his first public plea for call firefighters in more than two decades. And, an advertisement for call firefighters in Hanson brought no response, according to Travers.

Like Donahue, most call firefighters aspire to career jobs, Travers said. It is a logical move since Whitman and other communities provide call firefighters with training required for career firefighters, he said.

Call firefighters get regulation equipment and provide services in accordance with their training. They may fight a fire, drive an ambulance and, if certified, perform some emergency medical services.

"We need the manpower when we have a working fire or multiple calls," Travers said. "It becomes very disheartening to me when I hear the station's empty, and sometimes the station is empty for a very long time."

The lack of recruits for call firefighters is attributed to the times, both in personal lives and in fire services.

In some towns, the fire department is also the emergency medical department and 70 percent of calls may be for medical services. That happens in Whitman, Hanson, Kingston and East Bridgewater, among others. Carver and Wareham have separate municipal EMS departments, so firefighters generally do not respond to medical calls.

Whitman does not require call firefighters to be certified in emergency medical services, but Chief Travers said some are.

He is hoping some will inquire about the duties and consider service to the town.

Though there were 20 call firefighters on the rolls in the past, he said he will be satisfied boosting the ranks to 15.

"It used to be everybody lived and worked in the same town," said East Bridgewater Deputy Fire Chief Robert Fairburn.

Back then, a merchant would lock the doors of his shop to answer the fire whistle. Today, most people work out of town and, if they do work locally, do not have the luxury of leaving at a moment's notice.

Busy lifestyles may not allow time for training or for the middle-of-the-night response to a fire whistle, chiefs say.

Carver may be the exception.

"We work very hard at recruiting and retention," Chief Craig Weston said. "We've been very successful.

An annual call for firefighters brought 28 people out last year. Of that number, Weston said nine were added to the town's roster of 75 call firefighters.

The going rate for call firefighters is $10 to $12 an hour or more, depending on qualifications. Some towns offer minimum pay for calls 1.5 hours in Carver.

The average number of calls varies from town to town, depending on the services provided. In Carver, a call firefighter receives training through a local program, is certified and can expect to answer up to 400 calls a year.

A 2 p.m. call may bring out 18 firefighters, Weston said. That goes up to 30 to 40 firefighters for a major fire in the middle of the night.

"Every one of them has separate careers - plumbers, electricians, financial, DPW, cranberry growers, auto body, any trade you can think of," he said.

Elaine Allegrini of The Enterprise of Brockton, Mass., can be reached at eallegrini@enterprisenews.com.