When a snowstorm hit central Iowa on Feb. 5 and caused a massive 70-car pile up on Interstate-35, Krista McGinn from the Huxley Fire and Rescue department was there within minutes.

When there was an apartment fire in west Ames, Chloe Bender from the Gilbert department was there within minutes. Local emergency medical teams from across the county train to be able to respond within minutes. It just so happens that for many of them, they are doing it for free.

For over seven years, Keith Morgan has been the Emergency Management Coordinator for Story County. Disasters both man-made and natural are his forte, and his job is to be prepared for anything. What concerns Morgan though, is something far less dramatic.

“They are having difficulties getting enough people that are trained…quite honestly, many are getting older, and finding the young blood getting into it is getting difficult. That is probably one of our greatest shortages that we have,” he said.

Morgan thinks that this shortage could have a profound effect on the smaller communities that can’t afford to pay EMT’s in Story County, unlike bigger cities such as Ames who have their own paid service.

“There is a higher likelihood that when the call goes out for these first responders, somebody won’t be in the community and be able to respond when they need it,” Morgan said.

This is already happening in the local communities, as there is an increasing number of dispatch calls that are going down to second requests or asking for help from neighboring departments, Morgan said.

Huxley lies 10 miles south of Ames and has more than 3,500 residents. As the Deputy Chief of the Emergency Medical Service in Huxley, McGinn is in charge of responding to any and every emergency. And as the EMS Chief in a small community, she is painfully aware of the recent trends.

“Unfortunately, we are going on 400 calls a year, so that’s time consuming for a non-paid department,” said McGinn. As of April, the Huxley department has already taken 113 calls. “A lot of those haven’t been transported because our ambulance is out of service during the day due to the lack of staffing,” she said.

Typically, the town has seen a constant flow of young adults come through the EMS program and help out with the workload.

“We haven’t seen that in probably a year and a half, two years,” she said. “With Iowa State, we’ve had kids come in and we’ve lost a lot who have come in for a couple years and then have taken off and I think that is what our struggle is,” said McGinn.

Bender is an Iowa State student who volunteers as an EMT and firefighter for the Gilbert department, located a handful of miles north of Ames. Like Morgan and McGinn, she can see the problem of not having enough young people signing up.

“I can definitely understand that [issue] because the certification process is very difficult,” she said. “I am exceptionally young for someone who does this. Just in my EMT class I was younger than everyone by a solid six or seven years at least,” said Bender. In that same class, Bender says that the fail rate for the certification exam was nearly 75 percent. The position has provided Bender with financial issues as well.

“Sometimes it can be a little bit frustrating when you look back at how much you spend going to and from the station going to trainings, taking time off of the job you might have,” she said. “But later when you are sitting there thinking, dang I wish I got paid, you’re like ‘well, I signed up for this’, and I’m ok with it…I’m an adrenaline junky and I also realize that I am contributing to the community in Gilbert and to the community at Iowa State,” said Bender.

Katrina Fauser is the only other Iowa State student volunteering at the Gilbert department, and she sees many of the same issues as Bender.

“I struggled a little bit because I knew I wanted to do this, but I wanted to get paid for it because I don’t have the time to have a job while I’m here,” she said.

A genetics major and pre-med student, Fauser also finds the time commitment especially difficult. As a student volunteer, she could get called in the middle of the night to respond to an emergency and still have to attend an 8 a.m. class the next morning. However, she sees it as completely worth it in the end.

“The more I got involved in it the more I fell in love. I could change my major today and not go to med school and still be doing what I do because I love it,” said Fauser.

The decision between making money and volunteering for the EMS service is not a nuanced one, because many people just do both.

“Everybody who’s on here, knows it’s a volunteer service but every person that I have right now that covers a page…is full-time employed somewhere,” McGinn said.

For Huxley, the department has a total of one paramedic, one advanced EMT, six EMTs and two certified first responders. The service has previously been composed of volunteers, but in early March, the town voted to hire part-time day staffing. However, due to the smaller nature of the service, the pay is not at the level of most other paid departments. It is currently $10 for paramedics, $9 for advanced EMT’s and $8 for EMTs, said McGinn.

As EMTs often leave a full-time job to attend an emergency that could take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours, McGinn admits that they appreciate any sort of compensation. However, the calls are not always the most time-consuming part of their job.

“To stay EMS certified [in Iowa] every two years you have to have 24 hours, but to be registered at the national level you have to have 40 hours,” McGinn said.

The department at Huxley also has in-house training and meets for four hours every month. McGinn goes to one training session every year in Des Moines that takes 14 hours to complete. Even though she is required to do it to stay certified, she doesn’t get paid for it. In fact, emergency personnel often have to front the cost themselves.

“We pay for all our training to go. We use our days off days to go to classes. Our jobs are our vacation days. Eighty percent of my vacation days go to my departments,” said Julie Gfeller, a firefighter and EMT for Kelley and Gilbert. Some departments are better than others at providing free training for emergency personnel.

However, it is getting harder for all of them to keep up with the increasing amounts of required training.

“You hope the state in these rural communities doesn’t increase even more on how much training that they do and you hope that the department can always muster up the funds to keep helping the cost of training for EMT’s because it’s continual…because you still have to pay to go to classes generally,” said Gfeller.

The Gilbert department, north of Ames, is also ran by volunteers and does not have any paramedics or ambulances, as the Mary Greeley Hospital is close by. Gfeller sees Gilbert as unique to Story County, both in how the training is structured and its growth as a department. Gilbert has its own specialized training program that is aimed to bring the fire department and the EMS department together.

“One of the reasons that the program grew really well is that we kept people up on their training and kept people coming in together so we created more of a one unit…and I think Gilbert did a very good job of blending those together to create more camaraderie,” she said.

As the amount of training has gone up, so has the population in Story County – since 2010, the population has increased well over eight and a half percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Morgan also sees another trend that could pose difficulties for the emergency services in Story County.

“One of the things that has greatly reduced is the grant funding for emergency management,” he said. State funding often is used to buy new emergency and medical equipment, as well as outfitting the EMTs and firefighters.

Gfeller says that it can cost as much as $3,000 to fully outfit someone.

“Most of us don’t get paid anything for our calls. So any gear that we need, if we need pants or if we need shears, or if we need different things, many of us are on our own to get those,” she said. “There’s a lot of nickel and dime expenses that seem to go with being an EMT,” she said. However, Morgan said that there is little that the local departments can do about it. “Most agencies are running on a tight budget,” he said.

When McGinn, Gfeller, Bender or Fauser go out on a call, they know what they are getting into. Nearly all have worked fires, assisted in an accident or helped an elderly in a difficult circumstance. A sense of duty, a willingness to help and a heart for others are all necessary in the EMS world. But often, what they get out of it doesn’t come in the form of a check.

“Honestly, you don’t become rich being a firefighter or a paramedic,” McGinn said.