ALBANY, N.Y. \u2014 Fire officials are set to speak in Albany on Wednesday over what they\u2019re calling a public safety crisis due to a decrease in people volunteering at fire departments in New York State.<\/p>\n
Organizers say volunteer firefighter numbers have fallen to their lowest level in more than 40 years. News10NBC has covered volunteer shortages for years, recently speaking to Spencerport Fire District leaders<\/a>, who said its membership is 20% to 30% below what\u2019s expected. We also spoke with Brockport Fire District leaders, who aren\u2019t struggling with recruiting, but with having enough staff to train new volunteers.<\/p>\n Fire commissioners, chiefs, and firefighters are holding Wednesday\u2019s news conference, which begins at 10:30 a.m. They\u2019re calling on the New York State Legislature to pass legislation providing nominal compensation for mandatory, on-duty fire personnel staffing firehouses.<\/p>\n Organizers say nearly half a dozen firehouses across the state shut down last year because of a lack of volunteers. Fire officials also say there have been \u201calarming incidents\u201d in which fire companies have gone unmanned because of a lack of volunteer staffing.<\/p>\n More coverage of volunteer shortages:<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tFor Related Stories:\u00a0Fire department volunteer shortage<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0New York State<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALBANY, N.Y. \u2014 Fire officials are set to speak in Albany on Wednesday over what they\u2019re calling a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":152965,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[63670,9,11,10,49,51,50],"class_list":["post-152964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-fire-department-volunteer-shortage","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-new-york-state","tag-new-york-state-headlines","tag-new-york-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}