Brave Little State is Vermont Public’s listener-powered journalism podcast. Every episode begins with a question. Today:
“Who are the people working on Vermont’s fire trucks, and why do they do it?”
Note: Our show is made for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript below. Transcripts are generated using a combination of robots and human transcribers, and they may contain errors.
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Firehouse Lane
Josh Crane: From Vermont Public and the NPR Network, this is Brave Little State. I’m Josh Crane.
A few months back, a listener wrote in to ask, “Who are the people working on Vermont’s fire trucks, and why do they do it?”
I immediately thought of the volunteer fire department in my own town, Norwich. Every Halloween, they open up the firehouse to the community to hand out hot dogs and give the local goblins and ghouls tours of the trucks. My son is a big fan.
Toddler: Wee-o-wee-o-wee-o.
Josh Crane: But I didn’t actually know anything about the people who respond to emergencies in those firetrucks. So, I decided to get to know them better.
And once I started spending time with them, I realized how much the Norwich department is actually an anomaly in the firefighting world.
(Old-time firetruck siren)
Josh Crane: Oh, there’s the siren, straight out of the original 1938 fire truck the Norwich team breaks out for parades. Which means it’s time for us to head down to the garage at the end of Firehouse Lane.
Matt Swett: Alright, you guys ready? On your mark, get set, go!
(Sounds of volunteers using SCBA devices)
Josh Crane: It’s Sunday morning at the Norwich fire station, and deputy chief Matt Swett is putting some recent recruits through their paces. In order to pass the test, they have to go, quote, “on air” in 60 seconds or less.
That means putting on their self-contained breathing apparatuses. Just imagine SCUBA gear, without the underwater part. It allows firefighters to breathe in smoky buildings.
Each recruit claps their hands together when they finish. And Matt reads out their time.
Matt Swett: 43! 48! 49! 53!
Matt Rojansky: Nice improvement.
Josh Crane: A host of lieutenants, captains and other veterans of the department are on hand to help inspect the rookies’ work.
(Alarm beeping)
Matt Swett: Someone wiggle!
Josh Crane: “Someone wiggle,” shouts Matt, when a loud alarm starts to sound. Wiggle — not a command I expected to hear from a serious firefighter. It’s because of the Personal Alert Safety System, known as PASS.
Matt Swett: So, if a firefighter stands motionless for a certain amount of time — wiggle! Jeff! — it goes off to prevent someone from collapsing and going unnoticed, essentially.
Josh Crane: If you ever catch firefighters standing around in full gear and you notice them wiggling their hips, this is why.
Matt Swett: Alright, nice. You can take it off.
Josh Crane: The Norwich recruits doff their gear and relax a little. But their work on this Sunday morning is far from done.
Over the next few hours, they’ll practice a variety of foundational skills needed to get what’s known as a “Firefighter 1” certification — a national standard. They’re practicing for the big exam in a few weeks.
Entry-level firefighters all over the state and country are likely going through similar training. It’s basic stuff. But here’s what makes this scene, in Norwich, so interesting.
The department has not one, not two, three, four or five — but six new volunteer recruits. They’ll bring the department’s numbers to a whopping 28 people. For a small town fire department that relies on volunteers, this is a huge deal. And it’s unusual.
More with less
Josh Crane: Over the past three or so decades, the number of volunteer firefighters in this country has actually dropped, big time. And, on average, those same departments are now being called into action way more frequently.
More calls and fewer volunteers is an especially bad combination for Vermont’s fire service, since about 90% of all fire departments here are volunteer-based, which is more than most states.
All it takes is a few phone calls to firehouses around the state to get a sense of this.
Prescott Nadeau: Thank you for calling, because we’re gonna fall right in line with the trending national statistics.
Gerald Levesque: The trend of volunteerism in Vermont is very, very hard.
Prescott Nadeau: Our call volume has gone up.
Chris Pike: It's definitely got more difficult to find people with, um, the time.
Gerald Levesque: People just can’t give up that much time.
Chris Pike: You know, everybody's got a busy schedule.
Prescott Nadeau: I have been seeing the numbers of staff dwindle.
Chris Pike: You know, you could always use more help.
Prescott Nadeau: We had one firefighter going to a motor vehicle crash, and that’s just untenable.
Gerald Levesque: We’re at five people and we’re all senior citizens. I’ve been doing this 51 years.
Chris Pike: The younger folks are not as many.
Gerald Levesque: Ever since COVID, life has changed so much.
Ronald Morse: It's been harder recently in the last few years to get new people involved.
Gerald Levesque: There’s not much community spirit anymore that I’ve found. It’s one for all and all for themselves.
Josh Crane: Those were the chiefs in Hinesburg, Richmond, Ripton and Barnet.
Even with variation year to year, they all say that overall, it’s harder to recruit new volunteers now than it used to be.
And then there’s the Norwich Fire Department, flush with new recruits. And they’re not exactly from firefighter central casting.
Matt Swett: Here, we’ve got high-level Dartmouth professors. We have people in tech, engineers, people in computer science.
Josh Crane: We’ll be right back.
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Meet the team
Josh Crane: Norwich is one of the wealthiest and most educated towns in the state. The median income is more than two-thirds higher than it is statewide and residents are more than twice as likely to hold advanced degrees. Dartmouth College is just across the Connecticut River. There are engineering firms close by. And it’s an attractive destination for remote workers who want to live in a small town, while still living within driving distance of big cities like Boston.
So for a town of about 3,600, there’s an unusually large pool of people with the time and flexibility to devote to volunteering.
Matt Rojansky: Sitting in an engine responding to a call, you know, you could have a published novelist, you could have a biochemical engineer, you could have a paramedic.
Josh Crane: Or you could be sitting next to this guy, Matt Rojansky, a lawyer and national security expert. He joined the department five years ago after moving to Norwich from Washington DC, to be closer to family.
Matt Rojansky: Um, I think it's actually kind of been like a lifelong dream and obsession. I used to go to sleep clutching toy cars and trucks.
Peter Orner: I've always wanted to do it, yeah, yeah. I was one of those kids, you know, chased a fire truck. And if there was a fire in the neighborhood, I would be the first one observing.
Josh Crane: This is Peter Orner. He’s an author and professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College. On Town Meeting Day, he’s the town moderator. And he’s also one of the Fire Department’s new recruits.
Peter Orner: You know, I like, I like to be part of the community. I like to help out. I mean, we're, it's a volunteer—if we didn't have volunteers in this department, we wouldn't have a department. It's kind of up to us, you know? So if there's houses on fire in the, in the hills, we're gonna be the first people there.
Nathan Hadden: The camaraderie that we have as a team is phenomenal.
Josh Crane: One of the other new recruits, Nathan Hadden.
Nathan Hadden: Um, it's something I've only experienced in team sports, and being an adult, it's something you kind of miss.
Josh Crane: Nathan’s a land surveyor with an engineering background.
Nathan Hadden: And I do this to give back to my community and be a part of Norwich and the surrounding area. I probably wouldn't be doing this if I didn't have the flexibility to show up as needed at my schedule.
Josh Crane: A land surveyor, an author and a national security expert. There’s also a carpenter, a delivery driver and a state prison worker. There’s a forest ranger, a couple nurses and a handful of Dartmouth undergrads, too.
These guys have all sorts of day jobs. It’s a different scene than the one in professional fire departments in bigger towns and cities like Burlington, Rutland and Montpelier, where firefighters work at their departments full-time.
But volunteer firefighters — they just go about their normal lives and day jobs until a call comes in on their pagers.
Matt Swett: Here’s what the tone sounds like. (Beeping)
Josh Crane: Even though they’re technically volunteers, Norwich firefighters do get paid an hourly rate for some of their work, which is pretty common. Members get around $20 an hour when they respond to calls.
And when those calls do come in, it could be at any hour of the day.
Cody Williams: You know, we get calls in the middle of the night. Get calls on weekends, if I'm home in town, you know, not at work or whatever, like, there are loads of times you can still make calls.
Josh Crane: Cody Williams joined up three years ago. He works at a local biotech company, and has two young kids, with a third kid on the way. So, I suppsoe he’s used to waking up in the middle of the night.
Cody Williams: It just feels great to be involved in your town and, like, I don't know. It's a very magical feeling to be able to do something like that.
‘All hazards’ department
Josh Crane: Having enough volunteers to respond to any given call is a numbers game. But it’s not just a numbers game. It helps to have volunteers with different kinds of jobs.
And the value of having people respond to emergencies in the community where they live is hard to overstate.
Deputy chief Matt Swett remembers riding along with Linda Cook, who served in the department for over 45 years.
Matt Swett: Linda was a postal delivery person. We'd be driving to calls, and she'd be like, “Oh, oh, take this way. It's faster than the other way.” And then she always knew everybody's business. So she'd be able to tell us, like, how to do things better. Or, you know, “These people have dogs that are really aggressive, be careful.” So, so the different people that are part of a volunteer department have lives outside of it.
Josh Crane: For his part, Matt also volunteers on the local selectboard. He used to be a builder, and at one point, he ran a treehouse company. And he has a background as a tech entrepreneur. He rode the wave of the country’s tech boom after graduating from Dartmouth in the 1990s, and he’s been in the area ever since.
But he wanted to be more connected to his community. So, after a recruiting pitch from his neighbor, he joined the Fire Department. That was 21 years ago.
He’s worked his way up to deputy chief, which entails administrative work, like prepping budgets. But there’s also the community stuff. Like coordinating that big hot dog open house on Halloween.
Matt Swett: 777 hot dogs we gave out this year. Yeah. Every year we think it can't get any more.
Josh Crane: He also stepped up to serve as interim chief when the need arose a few years back.
Eric Friets: So, Matt did a great job, and it was a lot of extra work for him during his time as Acting Chief.
Josh Crane: Eric Friets is a veteran of the department, and a retired engineer. He and some other people got Matt a thank-you gift to recognize his extra effort.
Eric Friets: And we all got together and chipped in and bought him an old-style leather helmet.
Josh Crane: It’s white leather, with tidy stitching around the brim. And there’s a golden eagle perched on top.
Matt Swett: This is my most prized possession. You know, you're asking about how to, you know, recruiting and retention, and, and retention is all about, like, appreciating everybody's efforts. And, like that's pretty, that made me feel great. And every time I put it on I’m happy.
Josh Crane: The Norwich Fire Department has been around since the 1920s — originally, it was an offshoot of the local fish and game club. The culture of the department has always evolved as different members cycle in and out.
But what happens when a bunch of recruits all join at once? That’s when we come back.
_
‘A cyclical issue’
Josh Crane: It’s late Sunday morning and the garage, or “apparatus bay," is buzzing. A new recruit is practicing tying an axe onto a rope.
Buck Child: We’re going through the handle, right?
Peter Griggs: Through the handle. That's, that's an interesting looking conglomeration on the lines there. We'll call that ugly.
Josh Crane: In the back room, a different recruit is learning how to use webbing to move unconscious victims. And outside, they’re mid-lesson about the proper way to disassemble an extension ladder.
Alex Northern: What’s the last thing you have to do?
Peter Orner: Coming down.
Alex Northern: Nope.
Peter Orner: No. Flipping it?
Alex Northern: “Checks the tip and heel of ladder to ensure safety before plan.”
Josh Crane: Yet another group is focusing on a method to clear smoke from a building. And others are reviewing fire extinguisher protocol.
Nathan Hadden: First, I want to check that the extinguisher is full. And it is, it's full.
Josh Crane: There’s a lot going on. And a lot of people. I catch up with a few of them who are taking a break to see if this is what it always feels like around here.
Alex Northern: Well, you know, when you're talking about a volunteer fire department, recruitment or retention is a cyclical issue, right?
Josh Crane: Fire Chief Alex Northern.
Alex Northern: So, sometimes you're lean with folks and sometimes you're rich. And at this point, we're kind of rich with people, which is a great place to be.
Aaron Lampteri: Yeah, it absolutely comes and goes in the time that I've been here.
Josh Crane: And here’s captain Aaron Lamperti, who joined 17 years ago after seeing a flyer at Dan and Whit's, the local general store.
Aaron Lamperti: I started, the department was really flush wish people, couples, families were really— and it has come and gone a couple times since then.
Josh Crane: Some of the people who went, and largely haven’t come back, are women, who used to make up about a third of the department. Aaron says some of those women were part of firefighting couples or came from firefighting families, like former postal worker Linda Cook, who’s a third-generation Norwich firefighter.
Most of those people have since retired. There are still five women in the department, but they all work on the medical side, not the fire side. No one I ask knows why there was a shift. But here’s what I know for sure: There are lots of dudes. A lot of them have young families. And a lot of them moved to the area recently.
Josh Crane: Is it just luck or is there something that happened recently that sort of led to this uptick, do you think?
Aaron Lamperti: I would say, we don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if the sort of demographic shifts post-COVID, that more younger people have moved to the area, and in many ways, that's just been fantastic.
Josh Crane: Sixteen people have joined the Norwich Fire Department since 2020. Even after factoring in retirements and people moving away, the department roster has grown over 30% in that time.
Deputy Chief Matt Swett says some of this momentum is organic.
Matt Swett: Sometimes, you'll get one new recruit, and that one new recruit just happens to know, like, two other people that he or she can rope in.
Josh Crane: But recruitment is always in the back of his mind, whether the department is setting up a public skating rink in the center of town, visiting local schools or serving up hot dogs on Halloween.
Matt Swett: So going out there and doing our Halloween open house is like a giant recruiting thing. That’s not why we’re doing it, but people are aware that, like— we remind people that we have a volunteer fire department.
Culture shift
Josh Crane: The post-COVID surge in department membership has accelerated a bit of a culture shift. Some of the new recruits are still in college. Others have kids who are barely preschool-aged.
And don’t get me wrong — there’s still an old guard here. It’s just that all the conversation and anxiety we’re always hearing about Vermont’s aging population seems pretty far away within the walls of this firehouse. And the firehouse itself is changing too.
During a quiet moment, Matt Swett leads me towards the back of the apparatus bay.
Matt Swett: Um, so we recently cleaned out this area because these new, the newer members have also started up a weekend workout.
Josh Crane: There are sandbags, kettle bells. A couple benches. It’s not exactly Gold’s Gym, but it does the trick — which seems to be as much about hanging out as working out. Directly adjacent to the exercise equipment is a ladder that leads to a loft area.
Matt Swett: That used to be storage, and there was a big push to making it a, like, sort of like a lounge area that we're going to call the fire tower.
Josh Crane: They still need to scavenge some couches and La-Z-Boys to really complete the vision. And maybe add an old firehouse standard:
Matt Swett: So, of course, someone said, we don't have a fire pole. Could we put a fire pole there? It's an unfinished discussion.
Matt Swett: So we're gonna, we're gonna wrap up here. So any questions, comments, concerns?
Recruit: Thank you guys for coming on your Sunday to help us out.
Cody Williams: Y'all are gonna do great.
Firefighter: Yeah, yeah, you're good.
Matt Swett: Yeah, we only did this because we expect you all to be the top six in your class, and I know you're gonna pass. (Laughter)
Josh Crane: After people clear out, deputy chief Matt pulls me aside to share something that’s been on his mind.
Matt Swett: You asked about the secret to kind of good recruit, like, how are we lucky? And I was thinking about that.
Josh Crane: Some of the things that make Norwich such a stand-out in the volunteer recruiting world are not really replicable — like the wide variety of flexible tech and academic jobs that people here in town have, or the seemingly neverending supply of young families who are moving to Norwich to be part of small town life.
But Matt identifies something else, too: You gotta find people who like each other.
Matt Swett: Because sometimes, when I get a call in the middle of the night, what motivates me is, “Well, I get to go see Aaron,” or, “I get to go see Cody.” And, like, and work with him on this. And even though the call might not be as exciting or stuff like that, it's still like a chance to just hang out with someone that you like.
Josh Crane: And when you’re a small-town firefighter, you’re not just working alongside your neighbors — you’re also responding to their emergencies.
Matt Swett: When we go to medical stuff or fire stuff, there's a high chance that we're going to know people. Like, that can be really good. It can also be, like, really heart-wrenching when we're, when we're helping people out, and we know them, and so, like, we're experiencing it with them in, in a way where if we didn't know the person, we wouldn't be.
I always train as if I need to learn it to help my neighbors. So, like, that gives me the “why.” Like, why do this? Why spend the time? You know, why get it right? Because I generally am going to know the people that I'm helping, and so I want to do the best job possible.
Josh Crane: There’s just one more thing to do before I head home. Matt has offered to show my firetruck-obsessed toddler and his friend around the garage.
Matt Swett: So here's our junior firefighter kit because we can’t go anywhere without, uh, public engagement. Here's a sticker for you. A badge. You like stickers?
Josh Crane: I suppose it’s never too early to start recruiting.
Toddler: It’s a ladder!
Matt Swett: Yes, it’s a ladder!
Josh Crane: Asa, what does a fire truck say?
Toddler: Wee-o!
Josh Crane: My toddler might still be too young to join. But a few months after my time at the firehouse, I heard from Matt: Two more new recruits have signed up to join the department.
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Credits
This episode was reported and produced by Josh Crane. Additional editing and production from Burgess Brown and Sabine Poux. Angela Evancie is our executive producer. Ty Gibbons composed our theme music; other music from Blue Dot Sessions.
Special thanks to Camila Van Order Gonzales, Alex Warner, Chris Pike, Prescott Nadeau, Gerald Levesque, Ronald Morse and Michael Skaza.
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