By Erica Galgon
The heroes of the world come together to help protect us and help us survive everyday. Firefighters, EMTs, fire police, law enforcement.
Some of them are walking the halls of Penn Manor.
You can’t miss them during an emergency, they’re the ones who have the buzzers buzzing and the pagers beeping.
But why do the junior fire fighters or EMS students carry those silly little pagers around during school. If all they do is make a bunch of noise during class?
“I carry them around for the calls we get. I don’t want to miss anything.” Said Darren Pickel of the Highville fire company.
One of the female volunteer firefighters in Penn Manor is Allison Rohrbach, a junior, doesn’t use a pager. She gets text messages when there is an emergency.
“It has been three years since I started at Pequea Fire Company, and now I am moving to Refton to start my next chapter,” said Rohrbach
The National Fire Protection Agency estimated that there were 1,148,100 firefighters in the U.S. as of 2009. Also, 29 percent of the fire fighters took firefighting up as a career. There are also 71 percent volunteer firefighters out of that 1,148,100.
More than 40 percent of fire companies provide EMS services, while 41 percent don’t provide any EMS services at all.
“I grew up in it,” said Joey McMillan about volunteering as a firefighter in the Penn Manor community.
McMillan spends most of his free time training and volunteering with the Rawlinsville Fire Company, located in Holtwood, Pa.
The hardest part of being a volunteer firefighter is “seeing death,” said McMillan.
Even though this may be a volunteering job, it is still a big part of the lives of many young men and women at Penn Manor.