Over the weekend, several North Fork fire departments participated in volunteer drives
When an emergency call comes into the all-volunteer Greenport Fire Dept., the three fire chiefs that run the department never know who is going to show up, they acknowledged in interviews over the weekend.
“Like any volunteer organization, you never know what the call is going to be, when the call is going to come, and who’re you’re going to have,” second assistant chief David Nyce said on Saturday during a weekend-long series of volunteer drives at North Fork fire departments and across the state. “So the more people you have to pull from, the less chance you’re going to burn out the people you already have.”
Like many volunteer departments across the North Fork and throughout New York state, the Greenport Fire Dept. is straining under the weight of a spike in calls and a staffing shortage that Nyce described as nearing crisis levels.
Staffing is a problem plaguing volunteer departments nationwide.
The U.S. is in the midst of a significant nationwide staffing crisis in its volunteer fire departments. About 65% of the nation’s fire department’s are all or mostly volunteers. In New York, more than 90% of fire departments are all or mostly volunteer, according to the U.S. Fire Association.
Many local volunteer fire departments are unable to meet staffing needs. The number of volunteer firefighters in the U.S. reached a low in 2020, according to the National Volunteer Fire Council, while at the same time, call volume has more than tripled in the last 35 years, largely due to an increase in emergency medical calls.
There are many reasons for the decline in volunteering, including increased time demands on young professionals and increasingly extensive training requirements. The sharp increase in call volumes in recent decades reflects the fact that fire departments today are also expected to provide a wide range of medical services and multi-hazard response teams.
What makes Greenport’s village fire department’s staffing crunch particularly acute is that the sweeping majority of emergency response calls these days are for medical emergencies. The one square mile village is home to two retirement communities, San Simeon on the Sound and Peconic Landing.
At a tentative budget meeting of the village board in March, Greenport Fire Chief Albie de Kerillis told that board that 75-80% of calls are medical emergencies, versus about 20% fire calls.
Nyce said that some of the increase in call volume is cultural.
“Nowadays, we’re trained to call 911 for anything,” he said. “My nightmare scenario is that we’re at [an unnecessary] call — a patient’s sick but could have been transported non-emergency — and on the other side of town we have someone having a heart attack or a stroke, and either we can’t get there, or we can’t get there in time.”
Last year, Greenport responded to 1144 calls, compared with 989 in 2022 and 847 in 2020, according to department statistics. Of the 1144 calls, 820 were “rescues,” or emergency medical responses.
Nyce said the department’s 26 volunteer EMTs — two of whom are chiefs — handled all the rescues.
“Some of them are working, but some are not active as we’d like them to be. So it ends up being just a handful of people handling that number of calls.”
Another challenge facing the department is patient care reports, which used to be done by hand but since 2021 have been required by the state to be filed electronically.
“It used to be handwritten, and you could do it, basically, in the time it took you to get to the hospital, or back from the hospital to the [fire]house,” Nyce said. “The electronic form, if you’re good at it, takes almost 20 minutes.
“When you’ve got three calls back-to-back, the EMT now has to keep it in their head what happened on the first call, and the second call, because you’re not doing that patient care record until the emergencies are over.”
The chief said Greenport is most in need of more EMTs and ambulance drivers. All training and certification costs are covered by the fire department. To volunteer, contact the dept. at 631-477-1943.
