Hiwassee Dam – Several of Cherokee County’s fire departments, like others across North Carolina, have been struggling to keep enough manpower on the force, as training requirements and an aging community keep numbers in the all-volunteer force low.
Hiwassee Dam Fire Chief Chad McNabb said his department is lucky to have the membership it has, with 15 firefighters required at its main station, plus four each for its two smaller stations. However, he still struggles to keep firefighters, and several smaller departments across the county were barely able to keep the minimum 15 firefighters required to keep their stations open.
“You could talk to any (volunteer) fire chief in the three-county area, in all 100 counties in the state probably,” McNabb said. “It’s a state and nationwide problem; we just can’t get enough volunteers.
“Everybody’s in the same boat. It’s getting people to not only join, but to become trained.”
McNabb said North Carolina putting the same requirements on volunteer firefighters as professional firefighters has made it more difficult for volunteers to meet the requirements. He added that the 36 training hours now mandated by the state does not include training required by individual departments.
“It takes a lot of time, and someone who works full time at the city of Asheville, they’re held to a standard obviously. Somebody who is a volunteer is basically held to that same standard when it comes to the training, and it’s tough,” he said.
McNabb emphasized that volunteer firefighters usually have a full-time job on top of their obligations at the fire department.
“Those classes can range from 24 hours up to as high as 400 hours,” he said.
McNabb said Hiwassee Dam requires a 24-hour course on driving emergency vehicles, plus the state-mandated 36 hours.
“We do a lot of in-house training, about nine hours a month, and we still have people who say they can’t make the minimum 36 (hours),” he said.
McNabb said he often has to take volunteers off the roster at the end of the year after they were unable to complete all of the required training.
Hiwassee Dam is one of 15 volunteer fire departments across the state to receive a grant to help support recruiting efforts. The grant helped the department with its online presence, as well as providing funds for tents and other items.
McNabb said the support helped, but the lack of quality internet in Hiwassee Dam, and the fact that many local firefighters work away from the district, still create difficulties.
“All that’s fine and dandy, and we’ve got a very active Facebook page – probably one of the more active ones in definitely the county, but possibly the state because we have a lady whose all about the Facebook,” McNabb said.
“She posts a lot, and it’s helped. The problem is, here in Hiwassee Dam, that not everybody has internet.”
He suggested that making portions of firefighting training available online would help with the situation.
“Most of our new people who have joined are people who have moved into the community,” McNabb said.
“We have very few what you’d call natives, people who’ve been in this community for 20 or 30 years. We’ve picked up very few of them.”
He said anyone interested in becoming a volunteer firefighter should first contact the chief of their local department by calling the station or go through the department’s social media.
“A lot of the departments have a Facebook presence they can be contacted through,” McNabb said. “There’s also the Volunteer Fire NC website.”