Call of duty

EDITORIAL

Our standard definition for the word “volunteer” remains the one favored by the late Rockdale Mayor Bill Avrett.

He said a volunteer is someone who does a job for free that you could never pay them enough to do.

Even that definition probably doesn’t adequately describe the day, and evening, of the Rockdale Volunteer Fire Department last Wednesday.

Between 3:15 and 9:40 p.m. the RVFD fought three house fires, one of them a fully-engulfed home, the other two major blazes which our volunteers were able to save.

Only one of these fires was inside the Rock-dale city limits. The other two were in rural locations and one was in a really rural location, requiring responders to negotiate several county roads to reach.

This was during a day and evening when the temperature barely got above 40 and a chilling north wind gusted up to 30 miles per hour. It’s true none of these blazes were quite the magnitude of the 1998 Brookshire Bros. blaze or the 2002 fire that destroyed Arledge Antiques and Ballard Carpets Etc. downtown. Volunteers were on site at those epic conflagrations for multiple dates.

But last Wednesday’s were epic enough for the people who lived in those structures.

Fire Chief Ward Roddam said in his 30 years in the RVFD he never remembered a 24-hour period in which the department had three working structure fires, let alone three in 6-1/2 hours. Obviously a small-town volunteer fire department does not have enough personnel to send three different crews to three major fires. Many of the RVFD made more than one call and it would not surprise us if some made all three. But it shouldn’t be surprising. Our firefighters have been responding to their calling—pun intended—for a very long time. Nobody signs up to be a member of this elite department unless they are willing to work and work hard.

That includes dropping everything, or rousing yourself out of bed, at a few seconds notice and placing yourself in a potentially dangerous situation.

It involves making drill nights, and going to special training sessions, when you’d rather be at your kid’s Little League game or school play. It involves rolling up to the station dead-tired from a fighting a grueling fire, and knowing your can’t go home until you’ve prepped the hoses and the pumpers for the next call, because it might come in a few hours, or even a few minutes.

That’s exactly what happened last Wednesday. Rockdale residents have come to expect that kind of dedication from their volunteer fire department, which they obviously cherish.

What’s more, the RVFD expects that kind of quality and dedication from themselves.

And they deliver. They’ve been delivering for many decades.—M.B.