“Few People Know This”

You can bet Scott O’Neill has a few stories to tell from his nearly 30 years as a first responder –first as a 20-year police officer, detective, and chaplain in the Lubbock Police Department and now as a volunteer firefighter for the Brady Fire Department.

But this dedicated first responder has also taken on a mission of a different sort.

Few people know this, O’Neill says, but about 77 percent of firefighters are volunteer. Unless you are in a larger city that has a fully staffed paid career fire department, when a large fire breaks out, most of the firefighters that show up to battle the fire are volunteers.

Volunteer firefighting organizations can be traced back to the year 1736 when Benjamin Franklin created the Union Fire Company, the first volunteer fire department in the United States. Government-funded firefighting operations finally began to appear about the time of the Civil War.

Once O’Neill joined the volunteer firefighters in Brady, he slowly came to a realization. Although the firefighting organization was partially made up of volunteers, its reputation had become sullied in some people’s eyes.

O’Neill says that stems from what he calls the good ole boy days. Over time, many volunteer fire departments have come to be looked upon as a social club in some respects, conjuring an image of a bunch of beer-drinking, cigar-smoking, out of shape guys sitting around a table playing poker.