Small volunteer fire departments would see mass closures across the US unless the Occupational Safety and Health Administration changes how it treats volunteer firefighters on its upcoming emergency response rule, fire chiefs say.
The loss of small volunteer fire departments, which are often placed in isolated rural areas, could put communities at risk of delayed response time to emergencies and higher insurance costs for homeowners, advocates for volunteer firefighters say. Nearly 70% of stations listed on the National Fire Department Registry are volunteer and volunteers make up 52% of all firefighters on the registry.
While the volunteers say they are encouraged by OSHA’s recent claim it is rethinking the rule, they’re still pushing the agency to ensure they’re adequately accommodated in the final regulation, expected sometime next year.
“If emergency personnel say they’re concerned about their survival, people should listen up,” said former fire Chief William St. Michel, currently executive director of the Maine Fire Chiefs’ Association. “Maine has a population of 1.4 million and as far as I’m concerned there should be 1.4 million comments on the OSHA rule.”
OSHA is attempting a difficult balancing act on its contentious emergency proposed rule—enforcing the safest possible workplace practices while ensuring that the costs to do so don’t bankrupt businesses and cost jobs.
“Employees of small employers should have just as much right to a safe workplace as employees of a larger employer,” said Jordan Barab, former deputy assistant secretary at OSHA. “If I had a kid working for a small volunteer fire department or a huge department, I would still want my kid to have equal level of protection.”
But, “chilling a bunch of volunteer fire departments in a bunch of small rural areas all around the country is not in OSHA’s interests,” said Barab, who served at OSHA when they started the rulemaking in 2014. “If OSHA gets sufficient evidence that it’s just not feasible they will address that problem.”
What the Rule Would Do
The updated standard would cover over a million emergency responders, including more than 300,000 volunteers, according to OSHA. It would require fire departments to comply with over 20 industry consensus standards created by the National Fire Protection Association and other standard writing organizations that range from medical physicals for firefighters to training hours and equipment maintenance.
It’s not unusual for OSHA to circle back to a regulation when there have been significant developments in a particular industry over time, said David Super, a Georgetown Law professor with a focus on administrative law.
“These regulations were written, for example, before 9/11 which had huge implications for first responders and changed the way we think about first responders a great deal,” he added.
But in applying similar measures to firefighters across the country, OSHA is pushing a “one-size-fits-all” approach that disregards the fundamentally different circumstances of career firefighters in New York City and a small fire force in rural Maine, volunteer departments say.
Some of the new training required by the rule is specific to urban environments, which has no use for emergency workers in rural areas, the volunteers said. Some of the equipment maintenance, such as periodical truck checks, and physicals can also add up to several thousand dollars.
“There’s career firefighters, which, you know what? God bless. They chose that, that career path,” said Chief Corey Heidtbrink from Malcolm, Neb. “But for your rural departments? We’re not paid, we’re just here to help our neighbors.”
OSHA estimates that it would cost volunteer fire departments on average $14,000 a year to comply with the rule. That can be unfeasible to the thousands of small departments with yearly budgets under $50,000, said Ryan Woodward, chief of legislative and regulatory affairs at the National Volunteer Fire Council.
But that doesn’t mean they want a “free ride” , he said. The pushbackover the impact of the proposed rule may serve as a wake-up call for OSHA to take into account volunteer firefighters when crafting this policy update, he said.
For example, the physicals requirements are too broad when “what’s the number one killer of firefighters? It’s cardiac. Make something more narrow or economically feasible on cardiac, make a baseline exam, something of that nature,” he said.
When considering a blanket exemption for smaller fire departments, OSHA is likely to come up with an accommodation that is more focused on the causes of danger for workers and is less disruptive to the rest of the industry, said Super.
OSHA can’t just ignore comments, “then the rule will be struck down immediately if they tried,” Super added.
OSHA announced last week it’s considering an exception for volunteer departments, citing the growing concerns of economic feasibility.
“OSHA is committed to taking steps in any final standard, consistent with the rulemaking record, to assess and minimize detrimental effects on volunteer fire departments,” the agency said.
Bipartisan Concerns
There’s been bipartisan congressional opposition to OSHA’s proposal. In August, the Senate Appropriations Committee added language to a bipartisan spending bill that funds the Department of Labor directing OSHA to reconsider the rule’s applicability to volunteer fire departments.
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OSHA has jurisdiction over private workers, but many rural states have OSHA-approved workplace safety programs, meaning they apply federal standards to state and local workers. Twenty-seven states—including rural Wyoming, Maine, Iowa—have such plans and rely on mostly volunteer fire forces, which lawmakers say could be hurt by the rule.
But even volunteer departments in other states could deal with the emergency rule’s consequences, said Woodward of the National Volunteer Fire Council. Not every fire department’s funding comes from a municipality or county, with many doing their own fundraising—potentially making them private non-profit organizations that fall under OSHA’s jurisdiction, he added.
Chief St. Michel and Chief Heidtbrink say they’re hopeful that the bipartisan political pressure will ensure that volunteers don’t get the short end of the stick when the rule is finalized.
OSHA is supposed to carry out its duties despite a hostile political environment, Barab said, but it can be tough to ignore if the opposition is too great.
“Obviously agencies are somewhat impacted by opposition—the president only has so much political capital,” he said. “OSHA is not going to go forward and issue a rule if it’s certain that Congress will stop it.”
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