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Township deals with emergency services realities of today

We suspect the action taken by Old Lycoming Township recently will become the new normal in future emergency services for smaller boroughs and townships.

The towship’s supervisors agreed to collaborate with the township’s fire department on drafting job requirements and hiring an emergency services director, with the fire department paying for the majority of the position’s salary and benefits and the township contributing a portion of the funding.

The biggest point of the new position is to address the lack of volunteers to the fire department.

Part of the new position’s requirements will include leading the recruitment and retention of volunteer firemen. The township also wants the director to have EMT qualifications, allowing them to respond to daytime calls, and also have appropriate qualifications to drive firetrucks when needed.

Beyond that, the director will be responsible for administrative functions, including managing fire hall rentals.

The township also hopes that person can develop a “live-in” program whereby college students can live in fire hall residential quarters in exchange for volunteering a set number of hours.

In other words, the township is planning a paid position that will fill in all the weak spots the existing volunteer fire department is not equipped to handle.

“The big challenge we’re dealing with today is the lack of volunteers,” Old Lycoming Township Fire Chief Jeff Kukuchka said.

His words probably could be echoed by a number of fire departments in municipalities the size of Old Lycoming throughout our region. Those municipalities are large enough to have daily emergency needs but have a limited volunteer pool available to handle them. And there’s no way that limited pool can also handle recruitment and administrative duties in addition to responding to calls.

It will be instructive to watch how successful Old Lycoming’s emergency services plan works, because it’s probably the new reality.

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