Volunteer fire departments

44th Anniversary Edition Fire volunteers fill a crucial gap

South Queens depts. protect where others can’t reach

by Deirdre Bardolf

Associate Editor

Finding volunteer firefighters to serve is harder to do in recent years, but those who start young often stick with it.

When Nick Spinelli’s friend suggested to him that they join the local fire department after graduating high school, Spinelli said, “We don’t live in Long Island, bro. How are we going to do that?”

But there was one right in Hamilton Beach, he learned, and they went to the West Hamilton Beach Volunteer Fire Department that night.

It was May 2, 2007.

“I still remember the date,” said Spinelli, who is from Howard Beach. That night, he was able to go to the scene of a fire.

“I got to see how everything operated and it just grabbed me and it felt right. Like the people in the firehouse, the family feel of it, the community, it just felt right. And I kind of never left,” he said.

Now, he is the chief of the department.

In Broad Channel, Rich Bogart is the chief of the volunteer fire department and he, too, had been turned on to service by a friend at 14 or 15 years old.

“I went and checked it out ... And, 30 years later, here I am,” said Bogart.

Bogart became chief of the department earlier this year and said getting volunteers in the door and keeping them is a focus.

The Broad Channel Volunteer Fire Department has a junior department for kids ages 12 to 17 and it is part of the Boy Scouts Explorer program.

“I would say 10 of the last chiefs have come from juniors,” said Bogart. “They started out as kids, learning how to dispatch, learning how the fire department works and going through training and then working their way up through the ranks and sticking with it.”

That’s important amidst a national shortage for volunteers, he said.

Bogart is also the vice president of the NYC Volunteer Fireman’s Association, which covers the eight remaining volunteer departments in the city, five of which are in Queens: Broad Channel, WestHamilton Beach, Point Breeze, Rockaway Point and Roxbury.

He said there has been a dramatic decline in volunteer fire service in the last 10 years, estimating that there were previously 200,000 volunteer firefighters in New York State and that the number has dropped to around 80,000.

Spinelli said local recruitment and retention, especially postpandemic, is a focus.

“It really does pain me to say it, but volunteering is such a dying breed,” he said. “It takes special people to do it.”

He continued, “There are benefits to it but the response that I get sometimes is, ‘Yeah, but I’m not getting paid to do it.’ I get it. We’re in hard times, economically. So of course time is money and your time is valued but sometimes you have to work at things.”

When people are trained as EMTs, he said, they are also being given a potential career. “You can go to the FDNY with that card. You can go and join a private company, work for Jamaica Hospital and other hospitals as an EMT,” Spinelli said.

Bogart tells young people the same, noting that many of his members are police officers, FDNY members or sanitation workers. In Lindenwood, Chris DeLuca, chief of the Lindenwood Volunteer Ambulance Corps, said the problem is usually money or people. Right now, he thinks it is the people part. He, too, knows that times are hard for folks and volunteering is not at the forefront as they work several jobs to make ends meet.

“Recruiting is one thing, retaining is another,” he said. “Once they get a paying job, little by little, they disappear.”

Money is harder to come by too, especially with a budget of $90,000 to $100,000 a year, much of which goes toward insurance.

“Utilities have all gone up. Diesel fuel for the ambulances is off the hook right now,” DeLuca said.

“Right now we’re probably running about three to four nights a week. It’s been probably about 15, 20 years since we were here seven days, to be quite honest.”

Broad Channel and West Hamilton Beach are the only volunteer Queens firehouses in which volunteers are not required to be from the neighborhood. The West Hamilton Beach department has members from Brooklyn and even Staten Island.

The departments, especially in flood-prone areas of Queens, serve a special purpose.

The West Hamilton Beach firehouse was organized in 1928 by community members following a deadly house fire, said Spinelli. The closest responding unit was 15 minutes away.

“When the tide comes up or we’re getting a really bad storm and flooding occurs, a lot of the time the city units have issues in their responses,” he said. “They can’t go through the tide waters ... It damages vehicles, shorts out electrical systems. But if we’re already at the firehouse in Hamilton Beach, we don’t have to go through 165th Avenue and 102nd Street where the water at times can be a foot high, even without any sort of storm surge.”

The WHBVFD operates on a budget of $80,000 to $100,000 and answers 300 to 500 fire calls and 250 to 500 EMS calls a year. During the Sept. 11 attacks, its two ambulances responded to the scene and the engine and members covered an FDNY house.

The BCVFD was founded in 1905 as a bucket brigade, when the only way to get to and from the island was by ferry. The goal was to help minimize property loss and lower insurance premiums as there was no form of fire protection on the island. In 1907, the brigade was formally organized into the Broad Channel Volunteer Fire Association under its first chief, Edward Schlueter.

The current firehouse at 15 Noel Road was opened 1908. On June 14th, 1917, Chief Christian Hoobs died of a heart attack while responding to a fire. It was the only line-ofduty death in the department’s history, according to its website. In 1942, the department reorganized and became a Civil Defense Unit under a new name, the Broad Channel Volunteer Fire Department Emergency Auxiliary Corps. It was the first in the state to operate on a 24-hour basis out of its own firehouse.

At its inception, all the men in town were expected to join, said Bogart. “You were protecting your own home and your neighbors’ homes, you know, so everyone turned out.” At the height of the department, there were 150 to

200 members, he said. Now there are about 30. For as long as Bogart has been a part of the department, it has been fighting to get a new firehouse built in a more centralized location on Cross Bay Boulevard, near American Legion Post 1404 and the Broad Channel Athletic Club. The last bid that the department got for a new firehouse came in at a whopping $7.2 million, he said. “We’re currently working with all the local politicians, again to try to find funding,” Bogart said, and the vollies hope to go to bid again by the new year. They raise all the funds themselves aside from occasional discretionary funds from local politicians, and hold events like a haunted house this past Halloween and an upcoming Thanksgiving raffle and turkey karaoke event. The current firehouse at Noel Road was The Broad Channel Volunteer Fire Department was organized in 1905. It still operates out of its rebuilt after Hurricane Sandy and although it original site on Noel Road but is fighting for a new location. PHOTO COURTESY ED WILMARTH / FILE serves the department well and is more resilient than ever, “the fire trucks haven’t gotten any smaller,” Bogart said. Following Sandy, the houses are more resilient, too, resulting in fewer house fires, he said. Eighty percent of the calls now are medical. “We tend to focus a little more on potential water rescue calls and potential car accidents. We generally do get some severe car accidents, so we try to focus on that.” The department is trying to establish further benefits for members to rival perks on Long Island like free community college. In Hamilton Beach, Spinelli has a pitch he QUEENS makes to recruits: “We can provide you with the time, the training, the tools, the guidance, VOLLIES the support and the environment you need to succeed. But you have to be willing to bring the heart and dedication to the table. We cannot provide that to you. We can give you everything that you need to succeed with the department and in life and in this career field. But you have to bring the heart and the dedication. I can’t do that for you.” Q