New Grantsville City Fire Chief Casey Phillips is looking for a few good men — and women — to fill openings with the volunteer department.
The Grantsville City Fire Department is short seven firefighters, according to Phillips. At fully staffed levels, the department has about 40 active members and then a number of senior status members who may not run into burning buildings but still participate.
Phillips said he’s not sure what is causing the shortage in volunteers, but said people were jumping at the chance to be a firefighter when he joined the department 20 years ago. Like most volunteer departments, Grantsville has a number of legacy members following in the footsteps of their grandfathers, fathers and other family members.
The level of commitment might scare away some potential applicants, Phillips said. Being a volunteer firefighter requires hours of training and Utah has stringent standards, but there are opportunities to use the training as a member, he said.
“It’s plenty of action but there’s plenty of downtime,” Phillips said.
There are also staffing concerns for the North Tooele Fire District, which has a roster of about 30 volunteer firefighters, Chief Randy Willden said. The biggest challenge is securing firefighters for Erda, Lake Point and the district’s other outlying stations, he said.
In Erda, for instance, residents living east of SR-36 have a long drive just to reach their fire station at 2163 Erda Way. Since the fire district requires volunteers to drive to the station before responding to a fire, the amount of driving and infrequent fires is challenging for volunteers, Willden said.
It takes a couple hundred hours of training to get certified and going on only two to three calls per year can be discouraging, Willden said.
“It makes it very difficult for them to be an active participant,” he said.
Ideally each of the outlying stations in the North Tooele Fire District would have 10-12 volunteers assigned, according to Willden. The Lake Point station, for instance, has only four volunteers currently, he said.
In Stansbury Park, however, there’s no shortage of volunteers looking to sign up. Most people live close to the station and are available when volunteers are needed most, which is between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m., when the full-time staff is not at the station.
“We just have not had much success outside of Stansbury,” Willden said.
The Tooele City Fire Department is fully staffed, however, and Chief Bucky Whitehouse said there is actually a 12-person waiting list to join the department. Even Whitehouse sat on the waiting list for seven years before he could become a member of Tooele’s fire department.
A strong tradition of legacy members and camaraderie are the main cause for the success Tooele City has in recruiting members, Whitehouse said.
The desire to help the community is also a common reason that members sign up, according to the applications the department receives, Whitehouse said. Despite the waiting list, the Tooele City Fire Department is always looking for more applicants, who can sign up at tooelefire.org, he said.
Anyone looking to volunteer with the Grantsville City Fire Department can pick up an application at the fire station or at City Hall. Applicants must be a Grantsville resident.
Potential applicants for the North Tooele Fire District can visit the district website, ntcfd.com, for an application.