08/20/2026
On Monday night we presented our annual update to the Surry Selectboard on our calls and volunteer staffing.
We responded to 80 calls in 2025, a 19% increase from the previous year and our second-highest annual call volume in the past five years. One of the challenges of providing these services with a volunteer department is having people available when calls come in. Looking at six years of incident data, 41% of our calls occurred Monday through Friday between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., when many volunteers are at work or otherwise unavailable.
We have made good progress strengthening our volunteer response capability. The department currently has 24 volunteers, with 18 cleared to respond to incidents. Of those 18, 11 are trained and fit-tested to work in hazardous environments requiring breathing apparatus, up from seven with that capability as of February 2025. We also now have 10 members who have completed training to national Firefighter I & II standards, compared with five last year. With a Firefighter I & II academy requiring roughly 240 hours of classroom and hands-on training, recruiting volunteers is only the beginning—we also need to provide the time, training, and support necessary to develop them into capable firefighters.
Despite significant progress, training and professional qualifications remain a challenge. We expect federal requirements to increase in the coming years, bringing minimum firefighter training closer to national NFPA standards. Meeting those standards requires an enormous time commitment from volunteers who already have full-time jobs and families. At the same time, the breadth of what we are asked to do continues to grow. Our calls to assist EMS doubled last year, and the need for us to consider establishing first-responder-level EMS capability continues to grow. We have also recently found ourselves responding to more search-and-rescue situations. Just after Monday evening's presentation, we were dispatched to Cross Road to assist Peninsula Ambulance with packaging and carrying out a patient who had been injured in the woods.
The challenge ahead is not simply finding people willing to volunteer: it is giving them the training, experience, and support they need to safely meet the increasingly diverse needs of our community.
