Your community needs your help.
North Whidbey Fire and Rescue is in need of volunteer firefighters and is actively seeking recruits to fill several stations that are desperately short of personnel.
Chief Marv Koorn said there is a need for more volunteers at Station 21, the Cornet Bay Station, but Station 24 at Polnell Shores is the one most in need.
“We were down to one volunteer at Station 24,” Koorn said. “We managed to pick up two more young guys and they should be good by summer, but that still gives us just three. At Cornet Bay, we know that there will be a couple of our volunteers transferring out and another one will be going to college, so that puts us down to just a couple.”
Other areas in need of volunteers are Silver Lake and Strawberry Point.
Koorn said the reason for the low number of volunteers in a particular area has a lot to do with the demography of the population.
“Many areas have a lot of retired and semi-retired people living in them and those people are not as prone to become volunteer firefighters,” he said.
What people don’t realize is there are many jobs in volunteer firefighting “older” people are capable of doing.
“People in their late 50s don’t realize they can be an asset to the department,” Koorn said. “We have some guys in their 60s who are working for us. Firefighting is not all just going into burning buildings. We have older personnel who drive trucks, run pumps and do medical tasks.”
Koorn said semi-retired people are ideal candidates for first responder and EMT training, and also for the volunteer firefighter academy.
“This is because they have extra time to study and learn the things about the job,” he said.
Koorn said this is not to discourage younger people from applying as well.
“We have sent a ton of young people off to paying departments after being volunteers here on Whidbey Island,” he said. “Graduates of the firefighter academy can move on to any paying department as a Firefighter 1.”
If anyone is interested in becoming a volunteer, call the department at 675-1131 for more information.
