Putting out the call

By: 
Jill Meier/Journal Editor
Brandon Fire Chief Dusty Wagner

Brandon Fire Department in need of daytime volunteers
 
Jill Meier
Editor
 
The Brandon Fire Department needs more recruits who are locally employed and able to respond to calls during the day.
That wasn’t the case last month when construction at Brandon Valley Middle School sounded the alarm, requiring mutual aid from another department.
“We just didn’t have somebody in town right at that moment,” said Brandon Fire Chief Dusty Wagner. “We’ve been able to fill our truck, but it’s just every now and then.”
The BFD is 100 percent volunteer staffed.
“The perception is that volunteerism is dying, but the truth is volunteering isn’t dying, it’s just the ability to volunteer isn’t available anymore,” said Matt Cerwick, board president. 
“With businesses unable to allow employees to leave, that’s the biggest thing that’s hurting us. But with us it’s more of an emergency situation where it takes a select few that are available. Not only do we need those guys that are available, but they need to be trained, and we train a ton; that’s the only thing that hurts us is the commitment to be a firefighter.”
The department has 32 firefighters; however, nine are on probationary status, where they remain for about a year. The new recruit’s first course of action is to tackle the state-certified Firefighter 1 and 2 courses, which is a three- to four-month process. They also train with their fellow firefighters for a year by attending weekly meetings, trainings and assist at fire calls.
First Assistant Chief Gary Lembcke said there have only been a handful of times in recent years that Brandon hasn’t had enough volunteers to answer a call.
“We have a few members that work in town but their employers just aren’t letting them go because the cost of letting someone go now for an hour is a whole lot different than it was 20 years ago,” he said.
Lembcke said the department also have members who have days off during the weekday, but are not always available in service territory.
“The days we didn’t have anyone to go to the call, like at the middle school, no one was trained to take the truck,” he said.
Wagner said the department is working with the city to develop a perk for businesses that employ firefighters to allow them to go on calls.
“They understand we have a little bit of shortage during the day,” Lembcke said. “We’ve talked about coming up with an incentive for people that could be in town to run calls during the day.”
Wagner added, “We’ll come up with something, we just don’t know what it is yet, but we’re trying to keep it at a minimal cost to the city and provide the best service we can.”
Several years ago, the volunteer department was taken off of non-emergent medical calls, lessening their calls by a couple hundred each year.
“We would be running over 600 calls a year if we ran every one that MED-Star ran in the city of Brandon and Brandon Township,” Lembcke said. 
To be a member of the BFD, Wagner said volunteers are required to live in the Brandon area, be 21 years of age or older, and pass a background check,
“After the paperwork process is done, you’re on probation for a year. We provide everything for them and will get them where they need to be. We just require a lot of time,” he said. Last year, Brandon firefighters volunteered a combined 8,000 hours in calls, training and work detail to the cause, and have been averaging one call per day. 
Firefighters meet weekly at 7 p.m. on Mondays, with the exception of holidays, and anyone interested in being a firefighter is encouraged to stop by the fire hall. 
“We just need to put the open call out there. We’re here every night except when it’s a Monday holiday or Tuesday, like the Fourth (of July). Come down, check it out. We can paint a picture, and it’s not a bleak picture. What we do down here isn’t all fight fire. We clean the place ourselves. We do all the lawn care, the snow removal, we train a lot, we run a lot of medical calls, and fighting fires is a small part of it, but it’s what we have to do,” Lembcke said.

 

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The Brandon Valley Journal

 

The Brandon Valley Journal
1404 E. Cedar St.
Brandon, SD 57005
(605) 582-9999

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