Brian Lee
If any volunteer effort is an honourable gift, volunteering as a first responder should count for two of them. It’s especially so in a small community where volunteering in a fire department requires an exceptional sacrifice.
First, it takes skill — which takes hours and hours of training. That occurs during what the rest of us call our "days off." Besides weekly practices and ongoing training, members often travel off-Coast to take courses in fire fighting or auto extrication or first aid or other bits of education that are increasingly relied upon by the modern fire department.
Members sign up for it because they know they’ll need it. It may not be well known that our volunteer fire department often arrives first at car wrecks or just about any other medical emergency that occurs around here. In order to even contemplate the spectrum of possibilities that might be waiting at the end of a call, you need to picture all the messy ways people die. And then consider the stress of being responsible for preventing it.
Local firefighters provide first aid and patient care when they arrive and perform any heavy lifting that ambulance attendants and RCMP don’t. Their volunteer efforts are also the reason you are able to insure your home in case of fire.
The fact they don’t get paid makes their job honourable; but the likelihood they will know the person unfortunate enough to require their help makes it a sacrifice. Ask any longtime firefighter and they won’t talk about the time they pulled a lifeless friend, or friend’s child, out of a disaster situation. Or when PHVFD members stood holding hoses outside a burning home knowing not everybody made it out. In a community like ours, which is founded on volunteers, nothing else compares to this potential for anguish.
If you’re like me, you don’t often think of these kinds of sacrifices. Local people have been performing these duties for longer than I’ve been alive. But in recent years, when the siren has wakened me in the middle of the night to help an ailing neighbour; or when they arrive at the burning house next door at the same time I do, I have taken notice.
And I think we all need to remind ourselves that the volunteers still must go to work in the morning like the rest of us. Or that someone needs to make their kids’ lunches before they head to school in the morning. But they were shaken out of bed at 2 a.m. and secured a fire or puzzled their way into a car wreck until dawn.
I hesitate to write this because I wouldn’t want to discourage anyone from joining ― because it’s clear if you talk to any of the members, or read my story on p. 14, that belonging to the Pender Harbour Volunteer Fire department is incredibly rewarding, in many ways. But it never hurts to remind ourselves that we owe a debt that can never be repaid — and now the Pender Harbour volunteer fire department has been doing it for 50 years. So, if you get a chance, thank them for it.
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