Union Leader Correspondent September 17. 2017 8:32PM About 80 percent of the calls to the Epping Fire Department are for ambulance service. JASON SCHREIBER/UNION LEADER CORRESPONDENT EPPING - With the number of fire and emergency calls continuing to rise, Fire Chief Don DeAngelis told selectmen this week that the days of trying to rely on part-time call firefighters to cover evening shifts are numbered.
Ed. Note: Interesting note here about younger volunteer firefighters coming into the fire service with a different level of commitment. is your department experiencing something similar? Is it a generational difference or is it that it is genuinely harder to commit the time?
DeAngelis warned that after this year the department may have to hire full-time firefighters to handle nights.
“For seven years we’ve been able to do it long after other departments went to full-time, and generally it’s about 1,000 runs a year (before) a department starts to have problems,” DeAngelis said.
The department logged about 1,200 calls in 2015 and 2016, but DeAngelis said that number is expected to surpass 1,300 this year.
About 80 percent of the calls are for the ambulance service, he said.
“Our older members are leaving. The younger members are a different generation. We don’t get the commitment we used to have. The members that are on work their full hours. We have very few exceptions to that … and we just can’t seem to maintain the amount of people we need to staff properly,” DeAngelis said.