State & Local Government Policy, Business and Technology

Volunteer Firehouses Struggle to Find Recruits

Stateline: SHIPPENSBURG, Pa. — Everybody in this fire station was sleeping one recent morning when the alarms started blaring. Six firefighters hopped out of their bunks and pulled their gear over their pajamas. The sun was still coming up when they reached a house where smoke was rising from the basement.

Afterward, back in their pajamas, the young men gathered in the station’s control room. The chief’s son wrote up the report: furnace malfunction in the basement, no injuries, no damage. Then the bantering began — about girlfriends, the holidays and work.

This all-volunteer fire station and the two others in Shippensburg, a factory and university town of about 5,500 people in a central Pennsylvania valley, are vestiges of the past. Firefighters sit around on weekdays playing rummy, and people gather for bingo Friday nights. Yet, the stations are much quieter than they were decades ago, when they felt like the center of the town. And as the community’s interests have shifted from the fire stations, the number of volunteers has fallen.

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