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Dickinson, North Dakota Fire Department Seeks Volunteers

The Dickinson Fire Department is a 'combination department,' meaning it is staffed by a mixture of professional and volunteer staff. The department has about 15 professional staff, including 10 firefighters, to go along with the roughly 30 members of the volunteer staff.

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(TNS) - An estimated 85 percent of U.S. fire departments depend on volunteer firefighters, according to the National Fire Protection Association. One of those departments is Dickinson, which wouldn't be able to operate without them.

With some volunteers recently moving away, retiring or quitting because of other employment, Dickinson, N.D., Fire Chief Bob Sivak is doing all he can to make sure there are enough firefighters to respond to the needs of the community.

"We could use four to six volunteers right now," Sivak said said of the shortage.

The number of volunteer firefighters has dropped below 30, and that makes Sivak uncomfortable. "We really need to keep our members somewhere above 30," he stressed.

The Dickinson Fire Department is a "combination department," meaning it is staffed by a mixture of professional and volunteer staff. The department has about 15 professional staff, including 10 firefighters, to go along with the roughly 30 members of the volunteer staff.

The department used to be all volunteer.

"The Dickinson Fire Department as a volunteer organization goes back 126 years," Sivak said. "(It was) citizens stepping forward in 1891 as volunteer firefighters that made it happen."

The department continued as an entirely volunteer force through the mid-1960s, when Dickinson's first fire chief was hired. When Sivak became chief in 2006, there were three full-time positions. Since then, the ranks of Sivak's career staff has grow by about a dozen but his volunteer base has dwindled.

Sivak attributed the shortage to a number of factors. One reason is that "the dynamic of Dickinson downtown has changed so dramatically," he said.

When all of Dickinson's businesses were in close to each other, downtown firefighters who worked there could run a block or two to the station if there was a call, Sivak said

Now that Dickinson has expanded and is spread out, the demands for firefighters to travel to and from the fire station is greater.

"That person that was a block away, is now a mile and a half away," Sivak said.

A more spread out community, combined with the fact that "people are just busier these days," makes it harder to recruit volunteers, he said.

Sivak cited a recent article by Madeline Bodin in Emergency Management arguing that the number of volunteer firefighters have decreased across the United States because of multiple factors including weaker communal ties, increased financial burdens and less work flexibility among millennials.

Another reason is that fire departments across the country have had a dramatic increase in the number of calls.

Bodin's article said "the nationwide tally of the calls departments respond to each year has tripled in the last 30 years."

"When I started as a volunteer 36 years ago, we responded to fires, period," Sivak said.

The demands of contemporary fire departments have grown from putting out fires to becoming "all-hazards response organizations," he said.

Sivak said firefighters now respond to situations involving hazardous materials, emergency medicine, auto extrication, confined space rescue, high angle rope rescue and diving-water rescue, among other tasks.

"It's not unusual to be holding a training every night for one of our different tasks," he said.

Even with all of these challenges, Sivak assured potential volunteers that the department will invest as much time and resource into them "as they will into us."

Those who want to volunteer to be a firefighter can call the department directly or visit dickinsonfire.com. Sivak also invites members of the community to talk with a volunteer, take a look at a training session or attend a meeting to see what is involved.

While Sivak isn't sure who said it first, he said he firmly believes: "There is no stronger expression of volunteerism in the United States than the volunteer fire service."

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©2017 the Dickinson Press (Dickinson, N.D.)

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