Parting shots?
BLUF
This is what happens when you have a government run by coastal elites with little or no knowledge of how most of the country lives and works. OSHA will hold public hearings beginning this week on the impact of the new regs on small-town and rural volunteer fire departments.
New OSHA Emergency Response Standards Could Shutter 80% of Volunteer Fire Departments.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is seeking final approval for a massive overhaul of the “Fire Brigade Standard” that’s been in place for 50 years. The 608 pages of new rules, quite simply, would mean that about 80% of volunteer fire departments in the United States would be forced to cease operations.
“Over 85 percent of America’s fire departments are either volunteer or mostly volunteer. Nearly 700,000 of America’s 1,056,000 firefighters are volunteers or paid per call firefighters,” a group of lawmakers, led by Sens. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) and Christopher Coons (D-Del.) said in a statement. “The proposed rule would apply to more workers than the existing standard and would require fire departments to furnish new reports, trainings, equipment, and health services.”
OSHA’s new standards would “increase training requirements, require more pre-planning for emergency situations, set stricter limits on the lifespan of some firefighting equipment, and impose more rigorous health screenings for [fire] fighters,” according to KCUR public radio.
For full-time firefighters, the new rules will save lives. Since the original Fire Brigade Standard was published, we’ve learned a great deal about carcinogens burned away in fires as well as toxic fumes that can lead to cardiovascular disease. Most firefighters who die while on the job do not die in fires but die of cancer and heart disease. A new standard is long overdue.
This is fine for big-city departments and other departments whose full-time firefighters are augmented by volunteers. But the new standards also cover other emergency employees who would be forced to go through training programs and other regulatory rigmarole that small towns and rural counties simply couldn’t afford.
Take training: the proposed regulations demand 80 hours of training for firefighters. For volunteers, that means two full weeks of work, squeezed in here and there, for no money.
“If I tell some of them younger guys that, ‘Hey, you can’t spend the night with your wife and kids. You got to go to training tonight,’ they might tell me to go pump sand,” said Joel Cerny, chief of the Linwood, Nebraska, volunteer fire department.
OSHA would also require more inspections of fire fighting equipment.
“That means I have to take the fire truck out of my district because we don’t have anybody living in our district that’s a certified mechanic. So then I’m taking the truck out of the district for the whole day, leaving my district unprotected,” said Cerny.
“If you read who the rule applies to, a lot of volunteers are going to be classified as employees for the purposes of the rule,” an expert who tracks federal regulations, Shoshana Weissmann, tells the Sun. “That means they’ll have to get lots and lots of extra training.”
The financial burden of the new rules would be so great that it would be “prohibitive” for many departments whose resources are already tight, and the training requirements would be “impractical for volunteers working full-time in other capacities.”
Citing an estimate from the president of the Kansas Fire Chief’s Association, Chad Russell, they note that “implementation of this rule could shutter up to 80 percent of volunteer departments nationwide.”
The Utah Sherriff’s Association said the rules would be “catastrophic” for search and rescue (SAR) volunteers. “SAR volunteers are essential and must be allowed to operate with limited restriction and regulation,” the group said, calling on OSHA to exempt all sheriff SAR volunteers from the regulations. “Failure to do so will inevitably cause a mass exodus of volunteers in the system placing countless lives at risk across Utah and across the west.”
This is what happens when you have a government run by coastal elites with little or no knowledge of how most of the country lives and works. OSHA will hold public hearings beginning this week on the impact of the new regs on small-town and rural volunteer fire departments.
I’m sure they’ll get an earful.