By Selwyn Harris
Ask anyone about the future of the Pahrump Town Board and inevitably the discussion leads to the fire department, the most expensive line item in the town’s budget.
Once voters agreed to turn the board into an advisory-only body after current members serve out their terms, whispers of what it all means for the fire department began to spread.
Is it possible the fire department could once again become an all-volunteer force — reverting back to its roots much like the town board is set to do in two years.
Such talk gives Justin Snow, president of the local firefighters’ union, cause for concern.
He says the call volume within the valley is too high for any type of volunteer force to handle properly.
“They say that it takes about seven volunteers to make up for one professional firefighter and that is simply because it takes that many people working full time jobs to have somebody available at all times. You are looking at several hundred people, assuming some are working on the weekends. It simply wouldn’t work,” he said.
Snow pointed to one crucial aspect of having a professional force on duty at the fire station — response times are often the difference between life and death.
“One of the things you are paying for with a professional fire department is that the guys are there all of the time ready to take the call. With volunteers, somebody has to go to the station, get the equipment and then go out there. It doesn’t matter if they live right down the street. Somebody showing up at a house fire with no equipment is no good no matter how well trained they are,” Snow said.
Former Pahrump Valley Fire and Rescue Service’s John O’Brien is all too familiar with problems a volunteer crew faces.
O’Brien began as a volunteer in Pahrump back in 1989. He became a paid firefighter in 1997. He said many of the volunteers had full-time jobs during that time, which left the town with just a handful of volunteers.
“We had a very small fire department during the daytime. From about six a.m. until six or seven at night. There was just one or two people here in the valley running all of the calls,” he said.
O’Brien noted that even though there were fewer residents and homes at the time, the fire crews had to travel long distances to respond to calls.
“This place was not as developed as it is now and there was a lot of areas to cover between calls. You were looking at long travel times to get to those calls. We had the three stations. Station 2 was out on Bell Vista, Station 3 was on Kellogg and Station 1 was sitting in the middle of town,” he said.
O’Brien also expanded on Snow’s point about having to abandon your full-time job in order to respond to an emergency where time is of the essence.
“I had both a pager and a radio and you would have nobody responding. You would have to stop working and park your vehicle at the closest station to the call then grab an apparatus and run the call. When you got back, you would park everything and get everything cleaned up again and then you would have to start back where you left off at work. It made the days very long,” he said.
During Pahrump’s volunteer fire department years, O’Brien spoke about what anyone would consider intolerable.
He noted there were times that no volunteer was able to respond to an emergency.
“There were times where nobody did respond. We had hay fires, structure fires, and motor vehicle accidents. I remember one afternoon when we had very high winds and we had a fire on a doublewide off of Elizabeth down on the south end of the valley. It started in the fireplace and me and one other person were the only ones fighting the fire. The sheriff’s department was helping us with that call. The main problem we had was there were about 17 people on the roster because the majority of the people worked during the daytime,” he said.
Yet another drawback of reverting to a volunteer force, according to O’Brien, was that it was next to impossible to make plans to spend time with family due to the nature of the job.
He noted that there were many times where he had to drop his fork at the dinner table to rush out on a call.
“You can’t make plans at all and that was the problem. I remember many times where I had to drop what I was doing and leave to go on a call. My family got put on hold. There were a lot of instances in the middle of the night where nobody would answer the page and instead of getting sleep, you’d have to get out of bed, go run the call, turn around and go back to bed again and try to continue what you were doing,” he said.
Responding to emergencies was not the only job volunteers were tasked to perform.
O’Brien also said that he would have to pull maintenance on all of the vehicles the fire department used.
Sometimes the work required specialized knowledge. Other times the department would not have the right vehicle to do the job.
“Sometime we had no fire trucks and that’s a big problem because we had no good structure fire apparatus at that particular point so we had to go into scramble mode to try to get fire trucks back into service that were out on maintenance issues. I remember being out in the middle of the desert putting a transmission into one of the fire trucks in the desert,” he recalled.
By nature, volunteers were not paid, but they did receive what was known as a per diem for each call they responded to.
The allotment helped to pay for expenses driving back and forth to the station in their personal vehicles.
All volunteers back in the day did receive training.
Crews were required to remain certified by taking what was known as Continuing Education Units CEU’s on a more or less regular basis.
Even with the certification, O’Brien said he would still not be comfortable with an all-volunteer force.
“Having been a volunteer fire department before and seeing the paid department as it is being run right now, I’m completely behind how it is being run now using the funds from the ambulance runs to run the fire department to subsidize the costs of having a paid firefighter on duty. It’s the confidence of knowing that there is somebody in those stations ready to make those responses in a timely fashion,” he said.
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- Special to the Pahrump Valley Times – A 1999 file photo shows Pahrump’s all-volunteer fire department. This was back when call volume hovered around 1,800 for the year.
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- Horace Langford Jr. / Pahrum[p Valley Times – Call volume today is so high, that an all-volunteer force would need hundreds of firefighters to effectively cover the community.
No union rep is going to be happy with a volunteer fire department, but that said, why not just let them stay on and cut their budget so its not the most expensive item. Nuking the town board is not going to change anything if the county agrees to keep the fire dept as is.
The budget and pay for these guys are all done from the billing for service provided. No one ever hears how much the ambulance service brought in but instead how much it cost. I encourage everyone to do there homework I heard the service brought in more then it pays to those guys salary. There are alot of questions I think the general community has but it always gets pushed off and never really answered. Like where does the extra money go? That is billed for services the men and women of the fire department work very hard and instead of beating them down at every chance. The workers have given up numerous pay raises just like the rest of the town employees. It’s not the employees who dictate the budget it’s the people at the top.
I agree that we need properly trained full time firemen. What we don’t need is bridled to a union contract I think we could have the county manager set up a department and hire a manager like we have in other departments. The manager would have flexibility not found in union contracts and the taxpayers would save in the pocketbook. Hell in legal fees alone, removing the union from the picture would be a economic windfall.
There are many volunteer fire departments across the country,,The highest search and rescue organization in the country and around the world is Chevy Chase Volunteer Fire Dept in Montgomery County Maryland, Volunteers are a good and in some case better than paid professional departments, With so many Pahrump Firefighters running to and from Las Vegas transporting non-emergency patients to hospitals there if and when there is a fire emergency in Pahrump there are not enough firefighters to do entries on fires. Federal laws say that firefighters can no enter a buring building to do interior fire fight there must be a minimum of 2 firefighters to enter the burning structure and a minumum of 2 more outside incase the firefighters entering the building need to be rescued,,The non-emergency transports to and from Las Vegas should be done by a private ambulance company not by the PVFRS.
There are many people in Pahrump,,some that were volunteer firefighters in places they lived before moving to Pahrump as well as many former professional firefighters that would be happy to be part of a Pahrump Volunteer Fire Dept.
I personally was a volunteer firefighter and worked for 2 different paid professional fire departments. The last was Big Bear Lake Fire Dept in California and they were a joke compared to the volunteer dept I was a member. Just because they are paid and “professional” firefighters does not mean that they are any better than volunteer firefighters,,Heck a hooker at the cat houses are called “professionals” but only because they are getting paid to be hookers.
County employee salaries are way out of line for the cost of living in Pahrump. Their salaries need to be inline with other job salaries in the community, Presently the highest paid jobs in Nye County are local government employees . The people of this country deserve to get a better deal for their tax dollars, not be slaves to public servents,, If anyone no matter who they work for waqnt more money then they should go where the money is.
Now if the present firefighting staff feels thay deserve the high salaries they now get then put them on 8 hour shifts,,40 hours per week and take tha beds out of the fire houses. Time they stopped getting paid to sleep.
Richard,
You obviously were never a real firefighter or you would not make such a moronic statement like “Time they stopped getting paid to sleep”. The fire and EMS departments merged in 1999 due to the inability of the two departments to keep up with the ever growing call volume. We then unionized mostly due to harassment, hostile work environment issues and manning issues, not pay. The pay came about many years after unionizing and that pay is still in line with small departments elsewhere. By the time I left my job the call volumes were ridiculous and we NEVER slept, in fact it was so bad we were falling asleep while driving. The men and women at the fire department do not deserve your anti paid department attitude. If where you came from was so great why aren’t you still there?
John OBrien is completely accurate in his statements. I was one of the few people who ran the majority of calls in that town and it was near impossible to keep up and that was in 1998. I put in over 100 hours a week alone. Sure lot’s of people SAY they would volunteer, but when it comes down to it and we asked for help those people never signed up or showed up, even in the years after we became paid. Everyone needs to get over it, the town needs a full time staff, especially for EMS calls. What you all need to do is turn your frustration in the direction of the still elusive “hospital” Pahrump so desperately needs. That would allow staff to stay in town where they belong. You also need to back off the anti union talk. The Pahrump IAFF is there to protect the members from the harassment that was so rampant in the early years and would prevail should the union be disbanded. If you think the union costs the town money, just wait and see how much the lawsuits for harassment and hostile work environment would cost!
As for any of the haters who choose to respond with negative remarks, I don’t care what you say, you are speaking without knowledge and I suggest you educate yourselves. I know what I speak of. I was there, I lived it and I helped build that department along with John and many other dedicated people. To my brothers and sisters still on the job in Pahrump, keep up the good work and stay safe!
Did anyone check with the local insurance companies on how this would affect our rates if we went with an all volunteer fire department? Somehow I can’t help but think our rates would go up.
Selwyn, did you think about that when you were doing this story? Might be something to look into.
Awesome article!
Richard, the federal law you refer to is: NFPA Standard 1500 and OSHA regulations in 29 CFR 1910.134.
Reading this article and the comments has just brought all the anger and frustration back that we thought we had gotten over.
Amargosa Valley had an awesome volunteer fire dept up until 2010. We handled over a 100 calls a year and almost always had no fewer than 8 well trained firefighters respond to any given call, we also had great response times. If it was a structure fire usually no fewer then 20 of us would show up.
Power over our Volunteer Fire Dept. was given to Nye County Emergency Services in Feb. of 2010. What proceeded to happen after that was a total tear down of the Fire dept. and ultimately of our town by the county. Those of us that weren’t fired (four in all,one paid and three volunteer) quit our dept. due to harassment from the county employees of NCES. This included nearly all the members who had passed physicals. The county showed total disregard for the safety of our emergency responders and of our community. We lost most all of our FF 1′s and all of the top responders. I believe our Volunteer Firefighters had earned the respect of the paid depts. that we were mutual aid partners with. What the county tore apart will take years to rebuild.
Though the citizens called for Brent Jones and Richard Osbourne to be fired, the county Commissioners turned a deaf ear and let their goons run rampant on us, the volunteers that risked their lives for others. Brent Jones sent letters to four of our citizens threatening legal action against them for exercising their freedom of speech, he also requested the funds from the county to pay for his legal bills.
My point is: the firefighters need to have the legal representation that comes from the union. The county volunteers have none and no recourse to (unless they are filthy rich) be able to fight what the county inflicts on them. A volunteer is a sitting duck.
In Pahrump you need PVFR. I don’t believe that a volunteer dept. could handle the call volume that PVFR handles. Nye County created such a disaster in Amargosa Valley that four out of five Town ADVISORY Boardmembers resigned en mass leaving only Joe DeLee not because he disagreed, but because of his overwhelming strength and resolve to provide continuity of government and help his community through one of it’s greatest crisis and help bring about ELECTED Board status to try and clean up the mess. Sadly, we have recently mourned his passing.
There MUST be other ways to solve your money problems. You could end up with problems that NO amount of money can fix.
You as citizens need to stand with Chief Scott Lewis and the firefighters that protect you, if left to the county you may wake up some day in need of emergency help and realize that you have no firefighters to come to your rescue.
Chief Scott Lewis and his firefighters: It was a privilege working with you and all of you have our respect! To all the remaining and new Volunteers: GOD BLESS YOU ALL!
DON”T LET THE COUNTY GET CONTROL OF PVFR! Even though I think Pahrump is already spiraling into the County Abyss.
i guess you mised the november news paper article in the pvt saying 76 % of the firefighters voted no confidence in fire chief scott lewis i say it is time to let nye county run this fire department. insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results albert einstein
So the UNION thinks it’s a bad idea?
Because of our safety? Hah!
As usual, it’s their own overpaid butts they’re worried about.
There are many fire departments across the country that are part paid and part volunteer,, I worked for one fire department that started as all volunteer, later they hired drivers/engineers and the fire fighting manpower was volunteer,,As the county grew the department hire more paid firefighters to man stations from 7AM to 5PM weekdays because many volunteers worked during the day,As time progressed and more paid personel were hire the paid firefighters started a union,,The union the encouraged and supported “paid” firefighters in harassing all volunteer firefightes to drive them out. The volunteer force was trained and the department had a continuing training programs that included both paid and volunteer firefighters.
The second department I worked for as an engineer at Big Bear Lake had both paid and reserve firefighter, The reserve firefighters were paid for each call they responded to but only for the time they responded to fire calls,, The department never had a lack of personel during fire calls. There are many fire departments across the country that are served by volunteer firefighters that are as good or better than any paid “professionals”. It is the same old union garbage that volunteers are no good. PVFS could do well with volunteer or paid reserve firefighters if the depatment provided good training as well as set good standards for them.. As it is now when most firefighters are transporting non emergency taxi service to and from Las Vegas when a fire call does come in and it is a working fire, there are not enough firefighters to enter the structure and fight the fire, and since the public is snookered by PVFS that they did fight the fire standing outside spraying water on the building the public cheers because they have no idea that to fight a fire the best way is to enter the building, find the fire put it out and the do a proper overhaul so there is no rekindle.
Volunteer firefighters are not a threat to any paid firefighter job just s threat to the union that cares less about the public only more members and being able to hold communities hostage to high salaries.
So for those professional firefighter out there you are no better than volunteers it all depends on the standards and the training of the department. Volunteers do it for the community professionals do it for the money..Big difference in the commitment of each group..
Again,,go look at the Bethesda Chevy Chase Volunteer Fire Department in Montgomery County Maryland, it has the highest and top rated VOLUNTEER search and rescue team in not only the United Sates but all around the world.
There is not a paid professional fire department any where that is better.
The International Association of Fire Fighters, headquartered in Washington, DC, represents more than 300,000 full-time professional fire fighters and paramedics who protect 85 percent of the nation’s population. More than 3,200 affiliates and their members protect communities in every state in the United States and in Canada. The IAFF is one of the most active lobbying organizations in Washington; its Political Action Committee, FIREPAC, is among the top 25 federal PACs among the more than 4,000 in the country. In addition to city and county fire fighters and emergency medical personnel, the IAFF represents state employees, federal workers and fire and emergency medical workers employed at certain industrial facilities.
I feel I have to respond to the allegation that professional Union firefighters not only drive out volunteers but are apparently selfish and only chose our profesion for the money.
Like approx a third of PVFRS I started out as a volunteer, in fact I started volunteering while in high school, then as I fell in love with the job I decided to do this as a career. No career firefighter that I am aware of decided on this calling, willingly sacrificing all that it demands for “the money”
Volunteers are an essential part of our organization. Quite simply we are understaffed and having the extra help is greatly appreciated. Volunteers with PVFRS are required to adhere to the same training standards as the career firefighters and this takes a large commitment in time and effort. Some come and go some stay longer. Union members don’t bully volunteers here, I’m sorry that seemed to be your experience before, but lumping all members of a group into one negative category is not only unfair but shows bias.
The members of local 4068 are here 24/7 365 because it’s what we choose to do. We enjoy the privilege of protecting our town and citizens and providing the best service possible and we are proud to be part of the IAFF. Please show these hard working firefighters the respect of not accusing them of having mercenary intentions.
Justin Snow-President
IAFF local 4068
Richard,
Once again you are union bashing. Tell me how that is any different than volunteer bashing? We are supposed to be a brother hood, not fighting against each other as you would represent. You apparently either didn’t read my post about being a long time high hour volunteer or just have a pre written form letter you respond with on any and all fire department posts to further your agenda.
I helped train and encourage many junior ems and fire cadets, one being Mr Snow. Mr Snow’s mother trained me many years before that. We had a long line of volunteers that became full time employees at PVFR. Many of us are older now and have passed the torch and to have you spew your hatred towards them is reprehensible. I again say if where you came from is so great why aren’t you there? Even better why don’t you return and work? Leave PVFR alone and let them do their jobs. You are starting to sound like a paid union buster Richard. You are definitely not part of our brotherhood, if you were you wouldn’t bad mouth your brothers and sisters. You are truly an embarrassment to paid and volunteers alike.
Once you have gone down the road to a paid dept., it is very difficult to go back to a volunteer dept. The demands made on volunteers are too overwhelming these days. Loss of time from work, demands for proper training, liability concerns (remember those guys called lawyers), and the elephant in the room workload. Pahrump has grown and PVFR also handles ems calls. I worked for years with a small paid/call dept. and the call firefighters would pick and choose which calls they would respond too, especially ems calls. Finally after about 10 years of declining response from the callmen, the dept. went all paid to handle the growing workload. Insurance rates would go up, especially for commercial properties if there is a return to a all-volunteer dept. Perhaps, PVFR should only transport to the local hospital and rely on a private ambulance company for the LV transports. Just a thought.
FOR BLACK STAR RANCH
“….using the funds from the ambulance runs to run the fire department….”
Did anyone else read this? In the late 60s and 70s when “heat” started rising over the ever expanding cost of running a paid FIRE department, some of these fire administrations found it was beneficial to orchestrate the takeover of emergency transportation and incorporate it into the fire department. Previously, most emergency and non-emergency ambulance transportation was operated by private ambulance services. The fire personnel would normally arrive “on-scene” only when extra manpower was required – in the case of a traffic accident or other fire service need, the F.D. would “clear” the call after the patient was loaded into an ambulance. Then, fire department administrations realized the advantage of incorporating ambulance transportation into the fire service due to their insurance “revenue streams”. It was a perfect way to mask the true cost of an all-paid FIRE department. The vast majority of emergency calls run are of a “medical” nature, NOT of a “fire” nature. Add to this a union pay structure, additional run/operational costs through automatic paramedic staffing levels and much man-power redundancy, and you can spell financial ruin to municipalities decades later.
Towns, cities, counties, and most other municipalities understand that by keeping medical transportation services separate from the paid fire services, immense savings AND better service utilization are achieved. These two distinct services (fire vs. emergency care) have differing skill-sets, requirements, and needs. It’s time to revert our emergency care system to one which has historically made more sense – and one which keeps Pahrump’s resident needs and distinct demographics in the forefront.
There is a lot to answer here and unfortunatly I will have to try from my phone so please bear with me. The benefits of having a combined service are tremendous and obvious with just a little bit of thought. Lets use the example of a traffic accident given above. With the service PVFRS provides the personel that arrive on scene are both Firefighters and EMT’s or Paramedics, an Engine automatically responds as well also with cross trained personel. this means that there is no delay in treatment or extrication. Because everyone knows what needs to be done the patient will be quickly and effectivly treated and extricated, if there are extra patients and no extrication is needed the firefighters from the engine are easily able to assume patient care with no loss in service, this results in better and speedier outcomes for the patients and anyone else involved. If the same scenario where to play out with an all volunteer dept and a for profit service you run into a host of potential problems. Lets say that the for profit ambulance arrives on scene and the patient requires extrication they would be forced to sit and wait while the volunteers respond from home and then to the scene. with luck the patient will not be badly hurt and the wait wont be anything more than an annoyance. if there is multiple patients and one ambulance, because none of the single function people are cross trained they will be unable to help beyond a very basic level, its easy to see the harmful effects of this system why it was changed.
For profit services operate just as the name says, FOR PROFIT. this means they have a built in profit into the contract. if this is not acheived then the town has to make up the shortfall. as the person above me points out Pahrump has a distinct demographic, one that includes many people on medicare and medicaid. when the for profit service can not make the money it wants from billing these individuals it will turn to the town. the last contract AMR proposed to Pahrump stated they would only staff our town with 2 ambulances, these would be able to be sent to Las Vegas if the system got busy and there would be no replacement sent to Pahrump. PVFRS currently staffs 4 ambulances a day and sometimes has difficulty keeping up with the call volume, how this for profit serivce thought they could manage with two is insane unless you understand the simple truth that they did not care about the health and well being of our citizens only the bottom line of a budget.
PVFRS responds to approx 7300 calls a year, this works out to about 20 calls a day. these are a combination of fire and ems calls many of which require both skill sets. dividing the system up, giving your people less training therefore requiring more of them and increasing your response times makes no sense to anyone capable of objective thinking. PVFRS staffing levels are already low, if we were to follow the NFPA recomendations there would be as many people on duty a day as the department currently has in total. we understand Pahrumps unique structure and difficulties and we work hard to make sure we provide the best service to everyone who needs us. surely the solution cant be to cut out our local profesional Fire Dept and replace it with half of the number of for profit ambulances and a volunteer force that was hard pressed to handle the call volume of ten years ago?