Who puts out the fires in a small town? We sat down with the mayor of Pawnee and members of the Pawnee Fire Department to discuss the struggles that come with maintaining a volunteer fire department in a tax-poor county. Listen to the story or read the transcript below.

​

Interviews have been edited for clarity and format.

 

Fire Chief Marty Nichols: Marty Nichols, Pawnee Fire Chief. I’ve been in the fire service for twelve years. I’ve always been a volunteer. I started out in Jennings and then moved over here about five years ago, through the course of events became Fire Chief

​

Assistant Fire Chief Chris McCray: Chris McCray, I’m the assistant fire chief. I’ve been on the Pawnee Fire Department for sixteen and a half years. I’ve served as assistant chief for about eight years, was interim fire chief while we were searching for a fire chief, when we were lucky enough to have Marty apply and get the job.

 

Mayor Tom Briggs: My name is Tom Briggs, and I am a newly-elected mayor of Pawnee. We, as a small town, cannot hire full time firefighters. So what we have is a fire chief and then that is stabilized by our rural firefighters.

 

Nichols: The volunteer service is people generally that want to help their community because, you know, most of the time you don’t get paid. We pay by run here, so that’s kind of nice, but everybody that does it does it for community need. Because when you have a car wreck, when you have something go on, it’s people in our community that are helping people in the community and everybody involved wants to better the community.

​

McCray: Funding is definitely something that we struggle with. You can look at our equipment and what we have, how it’s nothing new, it’s nothing fancy compared to what you’ve seen in the big cities, you know, have brand new rigs that are hundreds of thousands of dollars, we have a 1970 model vehicles that we have to upkeep. So we do have times where we have to maintain, ‘cause stuff breaks down a lot when you have an older vehicle.

 

Briggs: It’s always a fight. There’s nothing in Pawnee that can’t be cured by money.

 

Nichols: We live in a poor community in a poor county. It’s very hard to get funding here in Pawnee County, most people go to Tulsa, they go to Stillwater, Payne County, Cushing, so they have a better tax base than we have. … We rely on memberships, we rely on, you know, grants, co-ed, state funding, things of that nature.

​

Briggs: In the larger towns, they have the personnel that are specialized in getting grants. And so it kind of puts small towns in a stumbling process because we’re not as an expert as a lot of other people are.

​

McCray: I’ve been lucky enough in my position as transportation manager for the Pawnee Nation, we was able to go after a grant for communication…. So we received a $181,000 grant and was able to give all the departments about 5-10 handheld radios, we was able to put up a new repeater. So, and that covered everything that’s in the Pawnee Nation jurisdiction, so about seven different departments we were able to help out that way.

​

McCray: And again, we leave our jobs and everything to go do this, you got to think, you know, it’s 3:30, I’m supposed to pick up my kids, what am I gonna do, you’ve got to be thinking of that, too. I got to find somebody to pick up my kids, ‘cause I’m on this fire, I’m on the scene. 

 

McCray: Again, everybody has their, being a volunteer, you have your own life. You have your kid’s ballgame or something like that, and you hate to miss those things ‘cause you don’t have another chance at life, this is your one chance, but you have that sense of community pride that you want to do, too, and keep people safe. So it’s a balancing act on that for each individual person.

 

McCray: There’s probably more cons than there are pros to be… Yeah, I know there are. But, again, it’s all, for the individual person, if they have that helpful spirit, you know, they want to be out there and help people. It gets tough. You go to a scene and it’s your best friend’s daughter or something, we’ve been there, seen that, you have to have that mindset that your job is to go out there and help and then, you know, lay your feelings aside and get the job done, and then you can react.

​

Nichols: We had an incident where a lady ran into the school last year, and obviously, had that been at the right time of day, each one of us responders would have known kids involved in that, because, I mean, you know, like Chris and myself, we help coach wrestling, we help coach different things, we’re highly involved in the community, in our churches, and everything else, so we know a lot of people.

 

McCray: I’ve actually pulled a couple people aside after, a week or so after an incident and talked to them, just ‘cause you can see something is just not quite right with them. But in leadership you just have to be cognizant of that, especially if it was a bad scene.

 

Nichols: If you didn’t have a fire department, you would have a very slow response getting help for a car wreck, for getting people trapped. When people are trapped in a car, you would have to wait for Stillwater, you would have to wait for Tulsa, which obviously, time is of the essence to save somebody’s life, so, you would be in dire straits without a fire department to be first responders

 

Briggs: It would be devastating. Because these volunteers that are on the fire department also bleed over into the ambulance service and things of that nature; auxiliary policeman, volunteer policeman, all of them work as a unit, it’s a symbiotic relationship and everybody, everybody benefits by all of us joining forces together. 

 

Briggs: We’re a great community, and we have great volunteers. And we usually rise to the occasion.