By Chip Womick
The Courier-Tribune
LIBERTY, N.C. — Spurred by the exciting world he saw depicted in the TV show “Rescue 911,” Matt Talbott signed on as a junior firefighter with the Staley Volunteer Fire Department when he was just 16.
The duties were simple: Wash trucks, sweep floors, take out the trash, roll hose.
He even got to run calls. He wore a pager and when a second page came in on a fire call — meaning that more manpower was needed — he could get up and leave class at Eastern Randolph High School.
Of course, he did not get to fight fires. Then, as now, one has to be 18 and have the proper training to do that. But he was where the action was.
He loved it. And he kept at it.
He graduated from Eastern Randolph in 1999. His last year of high school, he was hired as Staley’s first paid firefighter. It was a part-time position. He got out of school at noon and worked around the station. By then he was old enough to run calls, too.
He’s still a Staley volunteer and says he sort of feels like he owes them since they gave him his first opportunity in the fire service. But his participation has slowed a little since he was hired as Liberty’s fire chief, succeeding J.R. Beard, who retired last summer.
“I guess I just liked the excitement of it,” Talbott, 34, said last week. “Everybody always says it’s to help people — and it is to help people — but I guess I just liked the excitement of it.”
In addition to firefighter training, Talbott also started EMT training while he was still in high school. His first full-time firefighter job was with the Randleman Fire Department in 2001. He took a post with the Asheboro Fire Department two years later. He had just been promoted to engineer (driving the fire truck) and liked where he was working and what he was doing when the Liberty chief’s job opened up.
“I thought about it and thought about it,” Talbott said. “I never had intentions of being a fire chief.”
Since he lives just a few miles south of Staley, Liberty was close to home.
That was enticing.
He applied and convinced a committee composed of Town Manager Roy Lynch, two former Liberty chiefs (Beard and Filmore York, who’s a town commissioner these days) and Kernersville Fire Chief Terry Crouse (a former volunteer in Liberty), that he was the man for the job.
His new schedule, 9-5 Monday-Friday, is taking some getting used to. Talbott has been pulling 24-hour shifts, working just 10 or 12 days in a given month, for a long, long time. But he’s enjoying having more nights and weekends to spend with his wife and their 4-year-old daughter.
Talbott’s top priority, which he said he made clear during the interview process, is getting more paid staff.
Now, the fire department has two paid people — him and firefighter Ryan Leonard, who also works first-shift hours — to complement a roster of 26 volunteers.
“The volunteers do absolutely wonderful,” Talbott said. “I couldn’t ask for a better group of folks, but they’re still volunteers. They still have to work. We absolutely have to get more paid staff to provide the service that everybody’s accustomed to. We just need 24-hour paid staffing. That is absolutely a need.”
In 1995, Talbott said, the department’s call volume was not quite 200 per year.
Now Liberty firefighters respond to roughly 500 calls in a year.
“They had the same amount of volunteers then as we do now,” he said.
In days long past, volunteer firefighters were allowed to drop what they were doing at work and respond to a fire call. Those days are gone. And even if employers were as sympathetic to the cause as they were back then, Talbott said, most volunteers do not even work in Liberty, as they once did. Their jobs are out of town.
It’s unrealistic, he said, to ask volunteers to answer 500 calls a year, or even a third of that number — on birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, in the middle of the night, whether it’s hot or cold, raining or snowing — while also keeping up their training. The minimum required is 36 hours annually, but most firefighters probably log about 150 hours, he said.
Talbott plans to lobby hard for more paid personnel.
“If people are going to want to still get a fire truck when they call 911, it’s going to have to happen.”
He wants more volunteers, too, including junior firefighters, who must be 16.
“I’m looking for junior firemen, but I’m really looking for people that are 18. We’ve still got to have volunteers. We’ll always have to have volunteers.”
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(c)2014 The Courier-Tribune, Asheboro, N.C.
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