Volunteer Firefighters Are Big On The Mainland. Not So Much In Hawaii

John Harner was playing golf when he received a call from a fellow volunteer firefighter in the early afternoon of July 30, 2021. A fire had started a few hours earlier south of Waimea on Hawaii island.

The 67-year-old spent the next four days battling the blaze with his five-member crew, supporting the efforts of more than 120 federal, state and county firefighters as they successfully fought to keep the largest brush fire in the island’s recent history from spreading to Waikoloa Village.

Nearly a quarter of firefighters on the Big Island are volunteers and they play a key role in Hawaii Fire Department operations, spending hundreds of hours each month responding to fires, medical calls and a host of other incidents.

“Our volunteers are there to be that leverage when we have those bigger fires but they’re incredibly important,” Hawaii island fire chief Kazuo Todd said.

The ability of fire departments to muster extra help during extreme events has been raised as a critical issue after the devastating Aug. 8 Maui fires.

More than a third of recommendations in an after-action report on the Maui Fire Department’s response to the Aug. 8 fires focused on improving the department’s ability to marshal resources when needed — from creating mutual aid agreements with other agencies to finding ways to rally community emergency volunteers and retired firefighters when needed.

Seven out of 10 firefighters nationally are volunteers, but the Hawaii Fire Department has the state’s only volunteer firefighting program. Maui’s department, along with Kauai and Honolulu, is balking at the idea of turning to volunteers. Fire department officials cite challenges with implementation, training, certification and maintenance costs among their concerns. They also see dwindling volunteer prospects — a nationwide trend.

Hawaii County’s volunteer program is indeed shrinking and its volunteers are getting older. But Todd does not want to see them disappear anytime soon given the limited funding.

“I think our system is important for our island because of the historical context, the size of our island and the limited tax base that we’re able to draw on,” Todd said.

A 2022 audit of the Hawaii Fire Department said its volunteer program presented a “low-input, high return on investment opportunity” to address the Big Island’s issues. 

But Bobby Lee, president of the Hawaii Fire Fighters Association, does not believe it’s worth it. Lee would rather see heavier cash injections into the departments.

“The ‘volunteer fire service in Hawaii,’ is a nice buzzword,” Lee said. “But look at the reality of trying to make that work. It’s not doable nowadays.”

Few Volunteer Firefighters In Hawaii

Hawaii’s fire crews initially included many plantation workers who controlled fires for a living. Those firefighting roles slowly became career positions. With the demise of plantation agriculture and active land management, the full-time crews picked up the slack. 

Now career firefighters account for almost 92% of Hawaii’s force, according to the U.S. Fire Administration. That makes Hawaii second in the nation for its proportion of career versus volunteer firefighters. The National Volunteer Fire Council estimates that volunteers save the U.S. $47 billion annually.

On Hawaii island, the department’s 150 volunteers account for about a quarter of its staff. And they are crucial to the fire department for economic and geographical reasons, Todd said. 

The Big Island is almost eight times the size of Oahu but because it has a much smaller population, its fire and safety budget — about $46 million a year — is a third of Oahu’s.

The Tacoma, Washington, fire department serves 20,000 more people than Hawaii island’s department, but the geographic area it covers is 40 times smaller and it receives $37 million more a year in funding.

“I understand the dilemma of Big Island. They have only so much money to go around,” said Lee of the Fire Fighters Association. “But they have got to start investing money into the fire department like the rest of the state.”

Just how much of Big Island’s budget is allocated to the volunteers is “a complicated question. It’s not as simple as saying we aren’t paying salaries and wages,” Todd said.

Volunteers sometimes chip in for the upkeep of certain vehicles, and nonprofits and foundations might donate equipment. The program is overseen by two full-time staff members and there is the cost of providing training to volunteers.

The Maui Fire Department declined a request for an interview. In an email, Assistant Chief Jeffrey Giesea said the department revisited the need for a volunteer program in the wake of the August wildfires.

But the funding required to start a program, along with equipment needs and the nature of volunteering made a volunteer program not the “simple and cheap solution for providing surge capacity,” the email said.

Oahu’s surge capacity — the ability to increase staffing and resources during disasters — is covered by off-duty personnel and mutual aid agreements with state and federal departments, such as the military, Fire Captain Jaimie Song said in a statement.

Those agreements allow for one or several agencies to step in and help when others are tied up or overwhelmed. It is not uncommon for large wildfires on Oahu to be attended by multiple departments, with military helicopters often deployed to drop water buckets.

The after-action report written for Maui by the Western Fire Chiefs Association found Maui’s department lacked formal mutual aid agreements like the ones in place for Honolulu’s department. MFD is formalizing those aid agreements, Giesea wrote.

Another challenge for creating a volunteer force is that firefighters’ roles have expanded significantly, according to Kauai Fire Department Chief Michael Gibson. The job now includes dealing with medical calls, fire safety inspections, ocean safety and hazardous materials, among other things. So training and certification takes time.

“The educational component, annual recertification, and the training — and the calls in between — just becomes too much for a volunteer to be able to attain,” Gibson said. “They can’t take all these weeks off work.”

Short of reinstating a volunteer firefighting program — but in response to the issues highlighted by the Aug. 8 fires — Gibson would like to revitalize Kauai’s Community Emergency Response Teams. Those teams, which were also recommended to MFD in the after-action report, are generally trained in organizing communities during disasters.

“They know what the firefighters and police need to do, they know that they need to part the sea so the emergency crews can do what they need to do,” Gibson said.

Modern Day Problems

Hugh Montgomery volunteered at the Big Island’s Paauilo’s fire station for 13 years, most recently as a driver, before retiring in 2021. He said he was one of a “a good number of people who were more mature.”

“I retired at 80,” he said. “I felt I could have kept going but I didn’t want to have anybody have to explain if something went wrong.”

Big Island’s firefighting volunteers are generally in their 50s to early 60s, retired and many are “in amazing shape,” Todd said.

“We do recognize that our volunteers are getting older,” Todd said. “We ask them to do what they can, and no more.”

Attracting younger volunteers has become difficult. But the age of Big Island’s volunteers reflects a nationwide trend of aging firefighters.

Lee said the diminishing volunteer force comes down to the cost of living in Hawaii. Younger people have less free time as they try to make ends meet. And retirees don’t necessarily have the pedigree needed to fix Hawaii’s fire problem, he added.

No matter the age, attracting and retaining any volunteers has proven difficult nationwide. Volunteer numbers dropped by almost 25% between 1984 and 2020, according to the U.S. Fire Administration.

The Big Island department has 150 on the books — down from 350 a few decades ago, Todd said.

The solution, Lee said, is more direct investment in fire departments so they can hire more professional firefighters.

“That’s just the bottom line,” Lee said. “It really is a physical job and if you’re not properly trained and you don’t have the right qualifications and certifications, you can get hurt and you can die.”

Todd is unsure if the Hawaii island volunteer program will continue on its downward trend but he is keeping an eye on the future. He “doesn’t disagree in many respects” with Lee’s concerns, but so long as there is a funding gap, the Big Island needs its volunteers and its career firefighters, Todd added.

“I want more career firefighters and a robust base of volunteers,” Todd said. “The economics will ultimately be the decider, not me as fire chief.”

Civil Beat’s coverage of environmental issues on Hawaii island is supported in part by a grant from the Dorrance Family Foundation.