New Zealand Faces Volunteer Shortage
It looks like the U.S. isn't the only country where volunteer fire departments are short of firefighters. Check out this article from the Ashburton Guardian.
Your volunteer fire brigade needs you. Volunteers are needed as rural brigades across Mid Canterbury find themselves struggling to make up numbers for call-outs during the day as work takes volunteers out of the area.Mayfield chief fire officer Ian Feilder said the problem of attracting a full reserve of volunteers was discussed at last night’s annual meeting of the brigade held at the Mayfield Rugby Clubrooms.
“New members are always welcome,” he said. “Our biggest problem, as with most brigades, is during the middle of the day.”Mr Feilder said while the situation was not dire for Mayfield, rural brigades often struggled to have enough members to respond to a call-out in the middle of the day.
“At Mt Somers they have real big problems.”
Chief fire officer Barry Kerr confirmed Mt Somers was under pressure between 7am and 7pm.“We just haven’t got the men in the village during the day to run the brigade,” he said. “The day’s going to come when there’s not going to be enough to go out.”
Sound familiar? Those paragraphs could have been cut from any number of U.S. newspapers, except for the N.Z. lingo like "brigade" and "call-out".
