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A shortage of volunteers responding to nighttime fires has the leaders of Harpswell’s three community departments saying it’s time for the town — and taxpayers — to fund 24/7 coverage by paid town firefighters.
“When people don’t show up for structure fire calls, how much more warning do we need that we need extra help?” Benjamin Wallace Jr., chief of the departments in Cundy’s Harbor and on Orr’s and Bailey islands, said at a recent meeting of the town’s Fire and Rescue Planning Committee.
“One department being weak is one thing, but having a number of departments be weak — that’s an emergency,” Wallace said.
David Mercier, chief of the Harpswell Neck department, agreed that the shortage of active volunteer responders has made it hard to provide residents with the rapid responses critical to saving buildings and lives.
The shortage is painfully apparent not only when his own department’s volunteers don’t turn out in adequate numbers, but also when neighboring departments are unable to muster the firefighters needed to provide mutual aid.
“I’m expecting a lot more from my mutual-aid partners,” Mercier, who also serves on the town committee, told fellow department leaders at a recent meeting. “When I get one person (from a neighboring department) showing up, something’s terribly wrong with our system.”
Even as they try to remedy the volunteer response deficit, department leaders agree that it’s unrealistic to think that they alone can close the gap. Instead, they say, it’s time for the town to double the protection provided by staff firefighters.
Currently, the town has two paid firefighters on duty during the day from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Harpswell shifted to that model for weekdays in 2017 and added weekends in 2025 in response to declining volunteer participation. The result has been faster initial responses to fires, which double in size every minute.
But that hasn’t helped at the time of day when most fires occur.
“We’re trying to make sure we have enough firefighters to respond at night,” Wallace said. “Of the last 14 structure fires we’ve had in town, only one of them occurred during daylight hours.”
Today, volunteers alone respond to overnight fires. That slows response times as first responders wake up, make their way to their station, pull on protective gear, climb aboard trucks and respond to the scene. And when too few of them turn up, those who are there find themselves hard-pressed to extinguish the flames as quickly as they would like.
National standards call for at least six, and ideally 12-16, firefighters at each structure fire in rural areas. Under state and federal safety standards, there must be at least four qualified interior firefighters on hand — two to enter the structure to fight the blaze, and two more to stand ready to rescue them in an emergency. (An exception to the four-firefighter rule can be made if someone is trapped inside the building and must be saved.)
Aside from interior firefighters, numerous others are needed to operate the trucks pumping water and — in a town without a network of public water lines and hydrants — to shuttle tank trucks back and forth between the freshwater ponds that provide the emergency supply.
Mercier and Wallace said it’s not uncommon for their departments’ initial response to include only three or four people, often including them and their assistant chiefs. When a midnight fire broke out on July 12 at a home near Stover’s Point on Harpswell Neck, for instance, Mercier said that he and the other three firefighters from his department had to make the initial attack with precious little equipment and manpower.
With two lines spraying 150 gallons a minute on the blaze, the water from their engine’s 750-gallon tank was quickly depleted.
“That ran out in three minutes,” Mercier said. “We knocked quite a bit of the fire down, but then we ran out and I had to wait for mutual-aid trucks” from other departments.
Nationwide shortage
Harpswell is hardly the only town in Maine or the nation to consider adding more paid firefighters to ensure adequate around-the-clock coverage amid rising call volume and dwindling ranks of volunteers.
About half the nation’s population lives in areas where volunteer departments respond to fires and medical emergencies, according to the National Fire Protection Association. But the number of volunteers nationwide dropped from 827,000 in 2008 to 635,000 in 2023, a 23% decline.
To counter the erosion of volunteer support, many communities have begun to invest in a foundation of paid responders. After seeing its roster of volunteers decline from 100 to 20, with only half of them actively responding, Falmouth hired 37 full-time firefighters, nine of whom are on duty at any given time, according to the Portland Press Herald.
“For a lot of calls, we’d be lucky to get two or three volunteers to come out,” Fire Chief Howard Rice Jr. told the newspaper last year. “We still value them. They still do a good job for us.”
In Harpswell, leaders of the Harpswell Neck, Cundy’s Harbor, and Orr’s and Bailey islands departments say the volunteer brigades should remain the core of the community’s fire response efforts. But given the shrinking number of actively responding volunteers, they say the town should shore up its hybrid volunteer-staff system with more paid firefighters.
That takes money. Having two town firefighters on duty from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day currently costs taxpayers $345,000 a year in pay and benefits, according to Town Administrator Kristi Eiane. Moving to 24/7 coverage would roughly double that cost, although the precise figures would hinge on the mix of full-time and part-time firefighters because of the cost of benefits.
Currently, the town has two full-time firefighters, along with part-time and per diem firefighters who fill in the remaining time slots and cover vacation and sick time. Funding a 24/7 staff roster would require approval from the Select Board and voters at Town Meeting next spring.
Spending $350,000 more on fire protection would add 10 cents to Harpswell’s new property tax rate of $4.84 per $1,000 of property value. That translates to $20 in additional taxes for a $200,000 property, $50 on a $500,000 property and $100 on a $1 million property.
Fire department leaders stress that adding paid firefighters to the overnight response team would not eliminate the need for a strong turnout of volunteers.
“It’s not that the paid staff are supporting the volunteers. It’s not that the volunteers are supporting the paid staff,” Wallace said. “It’s both. It’s a system.”
Meeting an urgent need
The three departments are taking steps to increase both the number of volunteer firefighters and the frequency with which they respond, especially at night. A group of young recruits recently graduated from fire academy and joined the rosters at the islands and Cundy’s Harbor departments.
New and veteran volunteers alike are being encouraged to turn out more often, but leaders say they can only push so hard. Volunteers are just that, balancing their community service with work, family and other obligations.
“Unfortunately, we have some folks on the roster that aren’t turning out,” Mercier said.
Wallace added, “I don’t think people have the time that they used to have.”
While they agree on the need to add town firefighters, department leaders have been debating whether to staff up once a new central firehouse opens or to push for it sooner.
Currently, the paid town firefighters are based at the Orr’s Island and Harpswell Neck stations on varying days. The Cundy’s Harbor station lacks the facilities needed for full-time staff.
A new emergency response facility was approved by voters in June 2025, but because of delays due to environmental and budget concerns, won’t open until late 2027 or 2028.
Leaders of the Harpswell Neck department had initially argued that shifting to paid 24/7 coverage should wait until the new station opens.
“We’ve got our hands full right now with building the station,” said Harpswell Neck Assistant Chief Nelson Barter. “We need to get that up, running, underway and then possibly look at … hiring full-time, 24/7 coverage.”
Mercier had initially echoed that view, but he said recently that he is beginning to agree with Wallace and others that the need is too urgent to wait on the new facility.
Wallace has advocated for basing the overnight crew at the Orr’s Island station, which is the most centrally located of the three existing stations and the only one that has beds for firefighters.
“Are we really going to wait until we have a new station?” Wallace said. “We have a problem right now.”
Editor’s note: Jeffrey Good is a volunteer emergency medical technician with the Orr’s and Bailey Islands Fire Department.
