The Brown County (Nashville) Volunteer Fire Department is restarting its first responder service this week, 14 months after ending it.
Volunteers from the downtown Nashville station will start responding to medical calls again Thursday, June 1, Chief Nick Kelp said.
Since the end of March 2016, the BCVFD has only been responding to fires, crashes or emergencies on trails or in the state park, Kelp said.
Sometimes they’ve still been going on other medical calls if they know no ambulance is in the county. On one of those, a cardiac arrest, Kelp knows he helped save a life.
But for most medical calls in Nashville and Washington Township, the dispatch center has been calling Jackson, Hamblen, Fruitdale or Van Buren volunteer fire departments to assist the ambulance crew and police officers if the situation could be life-threatening, Kelp said.
The reason for discontinuing first responder service in April 2016 was because of personnel. The BCVFD had six volunteers back then, but only about three of them were able to respond regularly and only one had medical training.
Assistant Chief Shawn Fosnight said it became his goal at that time to rebuild the roster, get certifications back up and restart that service.
Now, the department has eight volunteers and seven of them have medical certifications. Five can take vital signs and perform first aid, and two basic EMTs can administer certain drugs and perform more advanced splinting and other tasks, Kelp said.
But still, only about two volunteers are available on weekdays during daytime hours, Kelp said. He has mixed feelings about restarting first responder service, which the members approved May 1.
“Personally, I feel medical runs are part of job, but on the other hand, I know it’s going to take its toll,” Kelp said.
From January to May 2015, 94 of the 212 total calls to the BCVFD were to assist an ambulance crew with a medical issue.
Much of those involved helping someone up who fell or getting someone on a backboard or a stretcher, Kelp said. Sometimes, a volunteer firefighter would drive the ambulance while both paid EMTs from the ambulance base in Nashville worked on the patient.
This year during that period, volunteers have responded to 130 total calls in Nashville and Washington Township.
In 2015, when medical calls were part of the department’s service, BCVFD logged 612 total emergencies — three times more than the county’s next-most busy volunteer department.
At the end of 2016 after stopping medical runs, total runs numbered less than 310, Kelp said.
Stress and the physical demand of the job were among the reasons why five of 11 volunteers left the department early last year, then-Chief Dallas “Dak” Kelp said at that time.
Dak Kelp is Nick Kelp’s father; the elder Kelp left the department at the end of 2016 after serving for 32 years.
The department’s top three leaders are now all in their 20s; so are nearly all of the volunteers.
Fosnight said he’s a little concerned that burnout could happen again, but he’s encouraged his fellow volunteers to talk about it before it becomes a problem.
Nick Kelp said the decision to restart medical responses was a matter of pride.
“When you’re doing it, you may hate going to pick someone up for the fourth time in a row at 3 in the morning, but when you hear someone else making that run, you think, ‘That’s my person to pick up. That’s my person to help,’” he said.
Nick Kelp and the two chiefs before him have tried for several years to work out a way to get paid firefighters at the Nashville station to aid the volunteers. But so far, the money to do that has not materialized.
The department’s best hope of paying firefighters — and keeping consistent staffing levels — is to form a fire territory between Nashville and Washington Township, Kelp said. That would allow the territory to raise money through new taxes.
The town council has been receptive to the idea and so has the township board. But no one has formally approached the Brown County Commissioners with a request to let Washington Township out of the Brown County Fire Protection District — a requirement to forming a new territory, Kelp said.
Kelp called the existing district a roadblock. The district exists by statute, but its board has been inactive for several years while a court battle played out about its duties and the way it was established. “It’s not helping anybody and it’s preventing us from doing what we think is the best course of action for helping our area,” Kelp said.
“For the short-term — hopefully, anyway — I want everybody to know we’re a volunteer agency and no response is ever guaranteed,” he said.
“Whether it’s a medical run, a car wreck or a house fire, there’s nothing that says we’re going to have people available all the time.”
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New volunteers are always welcome at the Brown County (Nashville) Volunteer Fire Department — or at any of the five other volunteer stations around Brown County.
Meetings at the station on East Main Street in Nashville are the first Monday of each month at 7:30 p.m. Assistant Chief Shawn Fosnight recommends that anyone who’s considering volunteering come to a maintenance night or training session to get to know the department a little better. Maintenance is at 6:30 p.m. on the third Monday and training is at 6:30 p.m. on the second Monday of each month.
Information: 812-988-4242
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