Hiawatha fire department growing to deal with increased call volume

Volunteer fire departments across Eastern Iowa are growing.

It's a trend that's been happening over the past several years. The Robins Fire Department has increased from about a dozen firefighters to 21. Swisher is up five members, and now has 30 volunteer firefighters. Fairfax has increased its volunteer force to 41; back in the early 1990s it only had 25.

Now, the Hiawatha Fire Department is experiencing a growth spurt of its own.

The city council recently approved the largest class of new volunteer firefighters in at least a decade. They have ten new volunteers. Now they'll have about 60 members, and the current crew has already started training the new class.

Tiffany Weyant is learning all there is to know about volunteer firefighting.

The 22-year-old is one of the new recruits, and she's ready to take on anything.

"I enjoy helping people, and I want to be able to go into any situation and know that I'm prepared to deal with it and help people in their time of need,” Weyant said.

Fire department leaders said there's a lot of need in the city as it grows and as the population ages.

"We have a significant number of runs. We've already had over 460 runs this calendar year, already, and if the pace continues with the growth we're seeing, we'll have a thousand runs. So it takes a lot of members to handle the runs,” said Fire Chief Mike Nesslage.

Nesslage said he knows an incoming volunteer class this size sets the bar high for the future.

"I hope we can keep attracting people and recruiting people to come, and we can continue to recruit this. The nature of the fire service today is that recruitment and retention is a challenge," Nesslage said. "There's a lot more things for people to do and what we're seeing is as recruits get older, they get more involved in their families and so they resign. So, we need to continually recruit a lot of people so we can keep our numbers up so we can take care of the community."

For now, though, the large, new class of volunteers will keep training for the day they can become  full volunteer firefighters to help the Hiawatha crew.

"I'm excited about what's to come,” Weyant said.

There's so much growth, the fire chief also says the department is in the very beginning stages of considering building an additional fire department on the other side of town. That decision is still a long way off, but Nesslage said he knows the department needs to continue growing along with the City of Hiawatha.