Front Line Neighbors: Volunteer Firefighting in Margaretville and the Catskills

Transcribed by Jerome Kazlauskas

[00:00:00] Jon Schebesta: So currently we have 35 active members, and on average we'll get anywhere from 8 to maybe 11 people per call, and that's after hours. If it's during the workday, it's a lot less.

[00:00:18] Brett Barry: Of the nearly 30,000 fire departments nationwide, 82% of them, 24,208 departments, are all or mostly volunteer. In New York, the percentage of volunteer fire departments exceeds 90%. Catskills communities rely on volunteer fire departments to respond to everything from chimney fires and wildfires to car accidents and floods. Our Catskill firefighters are our teachers, accountants, town board members, reporters, shopkeepers, moms, and dads. When a call comes in, our neighbors and friends respond, and while the number of calls is trending higher, the number of volunteers isn't necessarily keeping pace. There are a number of factors, including two-income families and heavier workloads, aging communities, college graduates moving out of their hometowns, and perhaps just a general shift in volunteering values. I think back to an interview my friend Josh Roy Brown and I recorded in 2017 with Phoenician Native Gene Gormley about the history of his town. As the interview was wrapping up, Gene signaled for us to keep the camera rolling. There was one more thing he wanted to tell us. Here's Gene with that postscript.

[00:01:43] Gene Gormley: You know what I would like to hit on if we could because I think it's really important, and that's volunteerism. In my time growing up as a kid, volunteerism was really important—the fire company, the community, life's blood, really, in a way. I mean, it was what everything that you'd get in the form of any emergency services other than our ambulance was from the fire company, and the men in the town really responded. Now you see signs that all the firehouses help [wanted help, needed volunteers wanted]—people are not volunteering, and it's not just for fire companies. People that were in the various churches volunteered for fundraising and so many things. The Rotary Club used to have 40 members, and now we're down to, I don't know how many, but volunteerism is really an important thing to me. I think we all, you know, need to take our responsibility in the community, and I'm glad I had a chance to say that.

[00:03:00] Brett Barry: Almost a decade later, Gene's voice still reverberates on this issue, and the need for community volunteers has never been greater. For today's show, we could have visited any one of the Catskills volunteer fire departments, but it just so happens that our friend Lissa Harris invited us to visit the Margaretville Fire Department, where she and other volunteers from both Margaretville and Halcottsville met up for joint training on blitz attacks. That's a firefighting technique where a high volume of water is rapidly deployed to knock down a well-established fire before firefighters can enter a burning structure. We met up with training officer Jon Schebesta, who was rigging pallets and rope to approximate windows. These would be hoisted from a ladder truck in the field behind Freshtown Marketplace for target practice from powerful truck-mounted water nozzles called deck guns. I'm Brett Barry, and this is Kaatscast at the Margaretville Fire Department in Margaretville, New York.

[00:04:08] Jon Schebesta: My name's Jon Schebesta. I'm the training officer, a lieutenant, and also the president of the department. Tonight, we're setting up for our drill, which is going to be a blitz attack drill, and what that is is where we use the deck gun. It's mounted up on top of the fire truck in order to hit the fire hard and fast upon arrival. The goal of that is we will be essentially knocking the fire down and trying to give ourselves back some minutes that we didn't have because fire always beats us, so right now at this moment, I'm putting together a makeshift two-story house out of some pallets and rope in order to give our firefighters a target to hit when we get down there for the training.

[00:05:01] Brett Barry: That's a small target.

[00:05:03] Jon Schebesta: Well, it's not too far off from a window, so we're going to hang this off of our ladder truck to simulate pulling up to a house, so essentially these will be hanging in the air, and then we'll be able to shoot at it. It gives us kind of the projection that a house is at this level, so it's called a blitz attack [B-L-I-T-Z attack], where we just hit it with a deck gun. We send all the water that's in the tank through the deck gun, essentially snuffing the fire as much as we can, cooling it, and kind of slowing down its ability to grow any larger until we can get further assets on scene and start handling the fire better.

[00:05:47] Brett Barry: And a deck gun is truck-mounted?

[00:05:49] Jon Schebesta: A deck gun is normally mounted up on top of the truck. They can be portable units as well, but it's a large-volume gun that's mounted right to the actual pump itself if you have a large fire and if you don't end up with a lot of people right away, and this is just another method to really snuff that fire down quick until we can get more personnel there. It's just another way of fighting fire.

[00:06:16] Brett Barry: How often do you do trainings like this?

[00:06:19] Jon Schebesta: So we do trainings at least once a month. Normally every Tuesday we're up here doing something, but at least once a month we do good rigorous training in order to keep everybody's skill set sharp and keep everybody up to date on any changes.

[00:06:36] Brett Barry: Is there a requirement for people to be here if they're volunteering with the department?

[00:06:40] Jon Schebesta: If you're a volunteer with the department, there is not a requirement to be here. It is encouraged because you can't be good at something unless you do some good bit of training to go along with it, but there's no requirement to be here, but at least once a month, we do have to do it per for the state.

[00:06:55] Brett Barry: How many volunteers do you have here?

[00:06:58] Jon Schebesta: So currently we have 35 active members, and on average we'll get anywhere from 8 to maybe 11 people per call, and that's after hours. If it's during the workday, it's a lot less.

[00:07:14] Brett Barry: And that's just based on who's available and who responds, and how do you know who's coming?

[00:07:18] Jon Schebesta: So we use an application, a cell phone app called IamResponding, that we check in on that, and that allows the officers for us to know who's coming and who we have. That'll give us a better idea if we need to start calling for mutual aid, try and get other departments to come to help us...

[00:07:35] Brett Barry: Is cell coverage an issue here?

[00:07:37] Jon Schebesta: Oh, absolutely, cell phones. The cell phone spectrum does not like mountains.

[00:07:44] Brett Barry: How does that affect your operations?

[00:07:46] Jon Schebesta: It is trying—the cell phone coverage is—for that app, it does make it difficult. It also does impact our radio communications. There are certain spots in our district where the radios do not work along with cell phones, but, you know, we adapt and overcome. We've got some measures, steps that we've taken in place in order to maintain that communication, at least to the 911 Center.

[00:08:13] Brett Barry: Lissa Harris jumped in with some of her own response perspectives.

[00:08:17] Lissa Harris: When we come rolling up to a scene, a lot of us are in our own private vehicles, so people are going to get there at different times. It's not like we all meet up and go over at once, so, you know, having that little bit of situational awareness of who's coming can be useful.

[00:08:35] Brett Barry: Not everybody arrives in a firetruck.

[00:08:37] Lissa Harris: No, they're going to have different vehicles dispatched depending on what kind of a fire it is. Is it a brush fire? Is it a fully involved structure fire? You know, is it a smoke investigation?

[00:08:53] Brett Barry: And it's not just fires, right? What kind of things do you respond to?

[00:08:55] Lissa Harris: We set up the landing zones at the hospital, so whenever there's a medical evacuation from Margaretville Hospital, we're out there setting up for the helicopter to land, but also, you know, all kinds of emergencies in the community. I mean, the reason that I joined was after seeing how much the department was, or how all the fire departments around here were, on the front lines during the flooding from Hurricane Irene, which, you know, I was a reporter covering that and so was kind of seeing the role of disaster response in the community and figured it was something that I should get involved in, but any kind of, you know, a road incident or wires or trees down in the road or natural disasters, you name it, the fire department is on the front lines.

[00:09:40] Brett Barry: This would be a good time for you to introduce yourself, Lissa?

[00:09:42] Lissa Harris: Hi, I am Lissa Harris, a longtime Margaretville resident. My family's been here for, I think, seven generations, and for a while I was running a news outlet here called The Watershed Post, and we covered the Irene floods pretty extensively, so that was kind of my introduction to the local fire department.

[00:10:04] Brett Barry: And did you get a warm welcome when you joined up? What is it like here? What's the atmosphere?

[00:10:10] Lissa Harris: I did. You know, I was terrified to walk in the door. I thought they were going to laugh at me.

[00:10:14] Brett Barry: How come?

[00:10:16] Lissa Harris: It just—it was sort of culturally intimidating. You know, most of the—most of our members—I think most of the members of volunteer fire departments generally are people who have been in firefighting families for a long time. They have lots of relatives in the departments. There's, you know, there's kind of a culture of that, and that is both—it's kind of a double-edged sword because it's morale, it's cohesiveness, it's community, but it's also can be intimidating to be outside of it and to not really understand it and to go, "Is there a place for me there?" And I was pleasantly surprised to walk in and get a very warm welcome, and I was like, "Oh, wow, now I have to show up," so I'm trying to do that.

[00:10:59] Brett Barry: How often are you able to respond to calls?

[00:11:03] Lissa Harris: I try to—when I am on active duty, I try to make it to every structure fire call that I can. I try to make it to our trainings, the training that you have to get in order to be interior-certified, which I did get from the state. It's two separate courses. There's a 79-hour course called Basic Exterior Firefighting Operations, and then once you pass that, you have to do another 50 hours of interior firefighting operations before you can be certified to wear an air pack [and be interior] and a structure, so that is a big time commitment, and it's one of our—it's one of the barriers to getting new people to sign up because it's daunting to immediately have to launch into that training. It's offered at specific times in the year through the county. You can—you could also go into a neighboring county, but, you know, it's not like these things are kind of running all the time. You have to sign up for a specific course, and it's hands-on, so you need to be there. They have made it a little easier in terms of some of the class being online in recent years, which is nice.

[00:12:07] Brett Barry: So everyone has a role, right, and not everybody's driving a truck. Not everybody's actively fighting the fire, so what are some of the roles that people have?

[00:12:17] Lissa Harris: I think of the fire police. My friend Jen Kabat is a member of the fire police, and she's actually allergic to smoke, so she found her place in the fire department even though she has asthma and can't really be around smoke, but, you know, what their role is, is to direct traffic around scenes and make sure that the vehicles—both our vehicles and anybody else that might be coming in or out of the scene—are safe, and it's—I would say it is every bit as dangerous and important as the job of firefighting itself. They're critical. There's roles for people who want to climb ladders and fight fires, and then there's other roles too.

[00:12:57] Brett Barry: What is your role?

[00:12:58] Lissa Harris: I mean, I like to climb ladders and fight fires. I'm still one of the younger, or one of the newer, I should say—not necessarily younger, but one of the newer members, so I try to listen and follow people that really know what they're doing if I'm on a scene, but yeah, I want to get in there.

[00:13:13] Jon Schebesta: And also our secretary, right?

[00:13:15] Lissa Harris: I am also our secretary. This is true. Yes, I'm not sure that's a job anyone's clamoring for, but, you know, it's important to have the administration of things go smoothly, so we have to step up to those roles as well.

[00:13:28] Brett Barry: What can either of you tell me about the capabilities of this firehouse? What can you do?

[00:13:35] Jon Schebesta: So we have the only ladder truck on the eastern far corner of the county. It's ourselves—Stamford Fire Department, Delhi, and Walton. I can remember off the top of my head. We're the only ones that are equipped with ladder trucks. Ours is a tower truck or a platform, which allows us to reach up high rises like we've got the Mountainside residential home. We've got the hospital here. They're the higher buildings that we need to have that ladder truck for. We're equipped with swiftwater, auto extrication, and standard firefighting. We do have a Polaris Ranger side-by-side for brush fires, a brush truck, and a 3,000-gallon tanker, so we've got quite a bit of equipment luckily.

[00:14:22] Brett Barry: What do you think are the unique challenges of this area?

[00:14:25] Jon Schebesta: Well, it's a very rural setting, as we all know and love about the Catskills, and it makes it difficult because we are kind of out in the middle of nowhere. If we need anything, we've got to go ways to get it, and luckily, by all of our training and all the equipment that we're lucky to have, we're able to offer a lot of those services that you're normally only going to see in the bigger cities.

[00:14:50] Brett Barry: And the strength of the Volunteer Corps here—I hear nationwide it's diminishing, but as far as Margaretville's concerned, what's the, kind of, the health of the department?

[00:15:02] Jon Schebesta: Well, we're battling along with the nation with the struggle of trying to find volunteers. We've been lucky and gotten a few in here over the last year, and if we can keep getting a couple here and there, we'll be able to build back up again.

[00:15:16] Brett Barry: What do you see as the reason for the decline in the first place?

[00:15:19] Jon Schebesta: We used to have a lot of members, but unfortunately they have grown older, and they've transitioned to fireplaces, so we still have them thankfully, but we just don't see a lot of influx of the younger generations like we used to. When I joined, there was 16 of us that were still in high school or just out of high school when we all joined, and you don't see that anymore, unfortunately.

[00:15:45] Brett Barry: What would you say to somebody listening who maybe has just a seed in their mind that, oh, maybe this is something I could try, like, but maybe something's holding them back?

[00:15:55] Jon Schebesta: If you have any inclination about being a firefighter, then you can be one. There is absolutely no reason at all that anybody cannot be a firefighter. Just because you don't like to go inside of a burning building, which doesn't make sense, but we're firefighters. That's what we do. We don't make sense. There's plenty of other jobs. There's the fire police. There's being an aide to the driver of the truck. There's a job for everybody, and if you have any worries or doubts, don't worry about it. Wherever you are, your firehouse should take you in with open arms happily, and they will give you the training. They will take the time, they will teach you, and they'll work with you because all we want is to see more people be willing to volunteer and step forward for, you know, saving life and property.

[00:16:49] Brett Barry: As you contemplate volunteering for your own community fire department, here's a quick message from our local sponsors, and when we return, it's off to the Margaretville field, where prop windows are hung and deck guns are blasting.

[00:17:05] Campbell Brown: This episode is brought to you by Briars & Brambles Books, the go-to independent book and gift store in the Catskills, located in Windham, New York, right next to the pharmacy, just steps away from the Windham Path. Open daily! For more information, visit briarsandbramblesbooks.com or call (518) 750-8599. Kaatscast is sponsored by The Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie counties, including brands for local regions like The Windham Weekly, Schoharie News, and Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call (518) 763-6854 or email mountaineaglenews@gmail.com.

[00:17:44] Brett Barry: On the edge of a field in Margaretville, New York, firefighters blasted prop windows hanging about 75 feet away from a fire engine with 1,000 gallons of water in the tank. Running the gun at full blast, they emptied that tank in just under a minute. At that rate, you could fill a good-sized bathtub in about 3.5 seconds.

[00:18:07] Jon Schebesta: Yep, as soon as you run out of water, shut it down. That's it. You're out. Hitch right and close it off. That's a thousand gallons. Halcottsville's Truck 1611—their new engine that's got a thousand gallons on board. Our primary engine, which is also our rescue truck that has 750 gallons on board. This truck right here—this is our tanker.

[00:18:34] Brett Barry: Yep.

[00:18:34] Jon Schebesta: This—its sole purpose is to bring a massive amount of water, and 3,000 gallons is what we'll bring.

[00:18:42] Brett Barry: And then can you tap into a local water source?

[00:18:45] Jon Schebesta: Yeah, so we've got hard suction and strainers. We'll throw it right into the creek and draft out of the—draft right out of the river or whatever water source we can find, including ponds or what have you. If we go to a house fire and they have a pond or a stream right there, we will use that pond or stream as long as it's sufficient in order to get a close water source in order to effectively fight the fire. We've got connections up at our station, like hose reels that are up in the ceiling. We just drop those down. We fill the truck right from the roof.

[00:19:14] Brett Barry: And so do they sit filled?

[00:19:16] Jon Schebesta: Yes, yeah, all our trucks will sit filled, fueled, and ready to respond 24/7.

[00:19:22] Lissa Harris: I'd say, "Most of the fires that we go to, you're not going to find a hydrant," so, you know...

[00:19:26] Jon Schebesta: No, we do not have hydrants.

[00:19:30] Lissa Harris: I have never personally used a hydrant on a scene.

[00:19:35] Jon Schebesta: With the infrastructure, the way that it is with the village, it is a small village. If we need to use the hydrants, we're only on it for a very short amount of time until we can establish our own water supply. It's not something that we can sustain off of for an entire—if we had a fire on, you know, a large house right on Main Street, God forbid, or something like that.

[00:19:56] Brett Barry: And this seems pretty high-tech. You've got this kind of robotic...

[00:19:59] Jon Schebesta: It has come a long way. Halcottsville's truck is more of the traditional manual style, whereas ours is all electronic motor, motor controlled, all actuator controlled...

[00:20:11] Brett Barry: Does that speed things along because guys can stay down here, or, like, what's the benefit of that?

[00:20:16] Jon Schebesta: It does. It allows you to be able to—with that wired remote, you can walk around and get different view angles of what the stream is doing, whether you're making a positive impression on the fire or whether you're completely missing it. It allows you to line it up better and get better usage of your water flow.

[00:20:33] Brett Barry: Between drills, I asked volunteer Nate Hendricks, "How much of this is for kind of sharpening human skills, and how much of it is making sure that the equipment works?"

[00:20:45] Nate Hendricks: All of the above.

[00:20:46] Brett Barry: Yeah.

[00:20:47] Nate Hendricks: Yeah, very much so, yep, for everybody to familiarize and refresh, you know, with the apparatus and how everything works and our response, but also you got to work the equipment too, you know, because if you don't, you know, just like with anything else, if you don't use it, you'll lose it.

[00:21:05] Brett Barry: I asked Nate how long he's been a volunteer with the department.

[00:21:08] Nate Hendricks: 23 years?

[00:21:10] Brett Barry: So that's a—that's a long commitment.

[00:21:12] Nate Hendricks: It is, but when you grow up, you're raised in a rural community, and your father's a volunteer firefighter, and all your friends' fathers are volunteer firefighters, it's kind of what, you know, in a small, small town, and when you have the, you know, the local commitment to give back, it's just when you turn 18, it's one thing we did back then, and here we are 23 years later.

[00:21:34] Brett Barry: So we were talking a little bit about how that's been declining—that volunteerism. Do you have any insights on why that is?

[00:21:41] Nate Hendricks: I think there's many reasons—little reasons. Obviously, we're in a very rural area to begin with, with not a ton of people around, let alone full-time people that live in the area. We're really looking for anybody who can and is willing and able to pitch in, in any way, shape, or form.

[00:21:58] Brett Barry: How do you, or how does anybody, balance what you do for a living, what you do during the day, and your commitment to the fire department? I would imagine it's not always easy.

[00:22:08] Nate Hendricks: No, it's definitely tough because we all have our regular nine-to-five jobs, but at the same time, at least for me, it's all about giving back to the community, and when—I want to say everybody knows everybody, you know, you never know who could be in need or in a time of struggle no matter what type of incident it might be, and for me, I just want to be able to, as much as I can, be there and help out, you know, your friends and neighbors when they might be in that need.

[00:22:37] Brett Barry: Give me a sense of how regularly the calls come in and what they're for. Is there something that kind of dominates? Is it always a house fire, or—it's gotta be a whole bunch of things, right?

[00:22:48] Nate Hendricks: Yeah, it's a variety of things for sure. You know, fortunately, and knock on wood, we don't get many structure fires, let alone house fires. Sometimes if we do—a lot of times it can be like a vacant house, but it really runs the range from setting up landing zones for helicopters for any EMS calls to assisting EMS with loading any patients that need to be shipped out to another facility to brush fires. The spring is very well known for wildland brush fires, grass fires, occasional motor vehicle accidents, a lot of alarm activations with, you know, these security systems for any homes that have a security system that could be, for one reason or another, set off, so it's really quite a variety, but fortunately, as far as, like, active fire—structure fires, we don't see a ton of those, thankfully.

[00:23:39] Brett Barry: Can you tell me a little bit about how a volunteer fire department is funded? So, obviously, the manpower is all volunteer, but there's a lot of expenses. I mean, these are some big, very expensive-looking trucks, and, you know, everything that goes along with it, so where does that money come from, and where's the need to keep it going?

[00:24:02] Nate Hendricks: So we are the Middletown-Hardenburgh Fire District, and so we have a board of fire commissioners that manages that. It now includes both the Margaretville Fire Department and the Halcottsville Fire Department, so really it's those district dollars that fund our apparatus—our equipment—and then the fundraiser that we do individually is the fire department kind of allows for our everyday operational expenses. You know, our annual dinner, our monthly business meetings, and kind of the soft cost component of that, but everything kind of on the large scale stuff is all through the Middletown-Hardenburgh Fire District.

[00:24:42] Brett Barry: Following a blitz attack training from Halcottsville's brand-new truck, Christy Goodell climbed down from the deck. She's employed with the local telephone company and responds to calls on evenings and weekends.

[00:24:54] Christy Goodell: This truck for Halcottsville is a brand-new truck, and so we're just getting a chance to learn our new truck, just giving us an opportunity to get better at running the equipment—getting better aim with the deck gun, as you saw that we were. You know, obviously, we have to aim for those two windows over there, and that's really what it's about—just making sure that we can do our job as, I mean, granted we're volunteers, but we're still, it is a job to us. Volunteering is about giving back to your community and the people that you live with and around, and I think that that's what everybody has to remember because one day that could be your family member that's in need of help, and it could be their home or a car accident or whatever, and I think it's important for everybody to realize that and for them to get out there and help because that's—the dying thing today is volunteerism, and we really need to give back.

[00:25:51] Brett Barry: Leaving the Margaretville field that evening, I stopped to say hello to Bob Vining. He serves as fire police and was sitting in his truck keeping an eye on the training area. Bob's 83 years old, and he's been volunteering with the department since, well, before I was born. What are all of the things that you've done for the department over the years?

[00:26:16] Bob Vining: Well, I've been in communications, I've been a firefighter, and now I've been fire police. I've done just about everything there is to do.

[00:26:26] Brett Barry: So this current role of fire police, what does that entail?

[00:26:30] Bob Vining: Keeping the traffic away from the scene. Keeping the fire department safe, all the guys are running back and forth, stuff like that. You can't have traffic going through, so that's what we have to do: direct the traffic around the scene.

[00:26:43] Brett Barry: What do you think about volunteerism in general? Is it something else, something that's fallen off over the years?

[00:26:48] Bob Vining: Oh, big time.

[00:26:49] Brett Barry: How come?

[00:26:50] Bob Vining: I have no clue. I don't know. The younger generation don't—well, most of them, they graduate from high school. They go someplace.

[00:26:57] Brett Barry: Yeah.

[00:26:58] Bob Vining: Go away from college, and sometimes they, one or two, will come back, but most of them stay away. If you don't have anybody available, you're sunk. We had 75 members. When I got in, there was a waiting list, and now we got 30-35 members or something like that, and only about 10 of them show up.

[00:27:24] Brett Barry: What would you say for anybody who's considering volunteering?

[00:27:29] Bob Vining: We'll be glad to have you.

[00:27:36] Brett Barry: Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast is a production of Silver Hollow Audio. Transcripts by Jerome Kazlauskas, announcements by Campbell Brown, and I'm Brett Barry, host and producer, and if you want to see that documentary I mentioned featuring Phoenicia's Gene Gormley, click the link in our show notes. Kaatscast is now broadcasting from WJFF Radio Catskill Saturdays at 11:00 AM. Tune in at 90.5 FM or on wjffradio.org for our hour-long broadcast featuring updated and expanded stories plus brand-new content, and, of course, you can visit us anytime at kaatscast.com and wherever you get your podcasts. Please subscribe, rate, and review to help other listeners discover the show, and you can follow us on Instagram [@kaatscast]. Thank you!

[00:28:33] Campbell Brown: Join us as a monthly member listener or make a one-time contribution at kaatscast.com/support. Thank you!