Local & State Headlines

Volunteer fire teams possible for Albany

• The Albany Fire Department looks at ways to improve its insurance rating.

Joshua Brown

ALBANY — Albany’s Fire Department may have one of the best insurance ratings in the state, but it’s not good enough for Albany’s top fire officers.

With an Insurance Services Organization (the group that determines fire insurance rates based on the quality of a city’s fire department) rating of 3, Albany’s Fire Department is already one of the top-ranked in the state.

But Deputy Fire Chief David Eddins says the addition of a volunteer fire department would take them one step closer to a 2.

A rating of 1 is the best attainable rating.

According to the ISO’s Web site, 1,073 communities in the state are served by a fire department rated at 4 or greater. Only 66 communities are served by fire departments with ratings of 1, 2 or 3.

But the volunteer force is still a ways from being operational.

The Albany-Dougherty Rescue Team is serving as the base group of members and is recruiting primarily by word- of-mouth, Eddins said earlier this month. The team is trying its creative hand at recruitment techniques to garner members for the upstart group, he said.

“We’re going to try to be creative and try to reach as many people as we can, through the media or job fairs or anything we can do,” Eddins said. “Ultimately we would like to shoot for the 1 (ISO rating), which is the best.

“Ideally we’ll be able to obtain the 2. And this is just a piece of the puzzle. With this volunteer force, that helps us to achieve that (lower ISO rating).”

There is only one community in the state served by a class 1 fire department, according to the ISO’s Web site.

The rescue team has about 30-35 members, all of whom will serve on the volunteer fire force, still in its formative stages. It takes four volunteer firefighters to equal one full- time firefighter by ISO standards, Eddins said.

While the force needs as many volunteers as possible, Eddins said they’ll take anybody they can get. The AFD will pay for all the volunteers’ training, which will show up on their future records, he said.

Eddins said he hoped the fire department could get about 150 volunteers for the new fire fighting team.

The volunteers’ primary job would be supporting the full- time firefighters by laying out hoses and preparing fire engines for use at the scene, which would free up the full- time force members to “actually handle the emergency,” Eddins said.

“They will be a tremendous asset to get stuff done outside, like getting hoses in place,” he said. “That will free up firefighters to actually handle the emergency.”

There are no requirements that a person must meet to join the force, Eddins said. And if a person has any aspirations of becoming a full- time firefighter, the fire department can use the volunteer team as an employee pool to draw from.

“We just need their attention and time to go through the drills; they just need to bring enthusiasm with them,” Eddins said. “We could even use that (volunteer force) as a draw-from in hiring. So if anybody wants to see if the fire service is for them, we want to encourage them to give this a try.”

Eddins said the new team is trying to schedule its training sessions now, working around the schedule it already has for its individual members and rescue squad training.

The department is looking at using a pager system to notify volunteers when they are needed, Eddins said.

“That’s what is used with a lot of the volunteer fire departments, a paging system,” he said. “It’s effective and cost- efficient.”

But Eddins warned that the job can be addictive.

“I never ever had aspirations of being a firefighter,” he said. “But after I got in it, I never would think about doing anything different. I think a lot of folks will be that way. It’s a tremendously rewarding experience, period.”

More Headlines>>