Henry County, in conjunction with its volunteer Fire & EMS agencies, is launching a three-month campaign to bring awareness to the importance of emergency response volunteers and to boost recruitment and retention efforts.
For many years, volunteer agencies have served as the backbone to the county’s emergency response network, but the number of volunteers has steadily declined over the last several years.
A reduction in the county’s volunteer force has strained resources for the agencies and led to an uptick in the number of calls that are handled by the Henry County Department of Public Safety (HCDPS).
“We have tremendous volunteers in our community but lately we have been asking them to do too much with too little,” said Matt Tatum, director of Public Safety. “It is unsustainable to have the same few individuals running all of these calls for these stations. They simply get burnt out. Our department was originally created to assist the agencies on these calls but due to a lack of volunteers, we’re quickly becoming the primary response for certain parts of the county.”
