The 500 Club has nothing to do with Pat Robertson. It is a bar in San Francisco, but I’m not talking about that here. Neither am I referring to accumulated home runs. On Bainbridge, the 500 Club is an elite membership belonging to Fire Department volunteers who have put in 500 volunteer hours in just a single quarter and are rewarded with a commemorative gold coin.
Do the math. Five hundred hours in one quarter comes out to four hours a day for more than 120 days. Members of the BIFD’s 500 club are so dedicated that they’re spending more than half of their work weeks working for free, serving our community for no reason other than that they want to.
But their volunteering is not just something that anyone who has a hankering to hang out in the fire station can do. The BIFD requires two certifications for the volunteers: Firefighter 1 National Certification requires 11 weeks of training in North Bend. EMT training requires 160 hours (16 per week) in Bremerton. All BIFD firefighters need to go through both.
Fire Marshal Luke Carpenter said that the department set the bar high for volunteers because they wanted there to be absolutely no visible difference between a paid, full-time firefighter and a volunteer. That’s an important criterion for a department that is about one-half volunteer staffed, with 35 volunteers and 33 career employees. In other jurisdictions it is not uncommon for volunteers to have their own stations and even engines. Not so on Bainbridge, where volunteers are fully integrated with the career firefighters, wearing the same uniforms, responding together to the same incidents.
The volunteers not only go out on calls. They also conduct fire prevention inspections, work on station maintenance, participate in ongoing training, offer free CPR classes to the community on the fourth Monday of every month, work at the annual pancake breakfast—and clean toilets.
Fire Chief Hank Teran said they’re doing all they can to be fiscally responsible and that includes using volunteers for service. “We’re committed to having this be a combo department,” he said. “It’s best for the community and keeps costs down.” Carpenter explained that the volunteers put in 2,000 hours per year, and the career firefighters put in 2,086, which means, he said, that having a volunteer is basically like having a full-time employee but at a fraction of the cost.
Except not for free. Jay Rosenberg, a half-time employee, is the volunteer coordinator for the department. He explained that the volunteers actually do get paid: a whopping $10 reimbursement per call for the two station resident volunteers and $10 for every two volunteer hours for nonresidents. This money comes out of the BIFD budget.
There are other costs too. Sending volunteers to North Bend for training costs money. So does getting them gear, which runs $2500 per person. Carpenter said that air packs are $4,500 apiece.
Three Volunteers
Among the 500 Club elite, toilet brush-wielding volunteers are Tien Tran, Kristin Braun, and Peter Gibson. Tran and Braun have received the 500 Club commemorative coin four times each. Gibson has earned it once. Tran and Gibson live at Fire Station 21 full time. Their residency requires that they put in 120 volunteer hours per month, or 360 per quarter. Those hours are not figured into the 500. Last quarter, Gibson put in 680 hours plus the 360 residency hours.
Tien Tran
Tran, who hails from Rainier Valley, said he manages financially as a volunteer by living carefully and not spending much money. He has lived at the station for three years. When he’s not working at the station, he’s studying, completing his bachelor’s in Fire Service Administration. Tran said, “I enjoy what I do. I think it’s more important than having a Mercedes or a Lexus. My dream is to be in a department.”
To achieve that dream, Tran has been actively testing for five years. The way the process works is a candidate completes the testing required by a particular fire department of interest. Each fire department conducts its own testing, and the tests vary from department to department. Once the testing is complete, if the department is interested, they put the candidate on a waiting list. If an opening in the department should occur, the department looks at the list for replacements and puts the candidate on an interview list. That’s why the process can take so long.
Braun, a former station resident, has volunteered for BIFD for nine and a half years. She’s also a full-time nursing student and will graduate in June. When Carpenter announced proudly that Braun has maintained a 3.5 GPA in her nursing program, she humbly downplayed it, saying that maintaining a 3.5 GPA is a requirement.
Peter Gibson
Gibson has only been at the BIFD for nine months. Prior to that he was stationed in Edmonds and Port Ludlow, and before that he was an intern with the Snohomish Fire Department. Like Tran, he’s looking for a fire department career and is actively testing. Gibson said he very much appreciates “an in-house test” because it better matches up a candidate with what a specific department is looking for. He said he does a fair amount of research before targeting a department for testing.
Gibson said he’s never been on a single call that’s been like any other. One of the most memorable calls was one for which he actually got to find out the ending. The call was for an unknown medical situation. One day months later, Gibson happened to run into the former patient who told him he’d been having a heart attack. He said, “You guys saved my life.” Gibson said it was “really nice getting that closure,” something that’s never happened after any other calls. But he also appreciated getting the information about the man’s condition. He said that, since then, he tries to figure out if they’re missing something hidden—like the man’s heart attack—when working with a patient.
(A fourth member of the club, Travis Lande, was not available for an interview.)
One Team
About the volunteers, Carpenter said, “My big thing is you can’t tell the difference.” Teran said, “There is no B crew. They’re all on the varsity.” Rosenberg said that one advantage of the BIFD is “the way the volunteers fit in seamlessly. That’s a big draw for volunteers to come to this department.” He added, “This used to be an all-volunteer department. So that’s the way it’s always been and always worked for us.”
Rosenberg, who used to work in Biotech, said that working for the Fire Department is a completely different experience. “You get a sense of giving back to your community. You get to be part of an organization that’s bigger than yourself. You learn how to care for your family and friends.”
Tran said that, for him, it’s been about accumulating life lessons. “I’ve learned how to communicate. It’s helped me mature. I’ve bettered myself physically and mentally. It’s not just a 9 to 5 situation. You never stop learning.” The way he thinks about volunteering is that “You don’t clean toilets at 8 a.m. You get to.”
He said volunteering for BIFD “changed my life completely.” He proudly showed me his 500 Club coin, which he always keeps in his pocket. “Other departments don’t offer this recognition,” he said.
Since 2009, BIFD volunteers do not have to be island residents. Teran said that the change “provides diversity for the department, which is important. It has also increased participation.” Rosenberg added that they had just received a call from a volunteer firefighter at a somewhat humdrum outpost in Montana who was interested in the BIFD because they get more life-saving, firefighting action. Are you interested? Contact Jay Rosenberg at VPC@bifd.org.
