VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (WAVY) — Max Gonano, a Virginia Beach firefighter and president of the Virginia Beach Professional Fire and EMS union, got off of a 24-hour shift on the Saturday before Father’s Day, just in time to spend it with his two little girls.
He was then told he needed to work an additional 12 hours.
“I get home when the kids are in bed and then I work the very next day,” Gonano said. “So, that’s not unique to me. That happens to people all over the department. I mean, it’s rampant and it is certainly damaging morale.”
Gonano said Virginia Beach firefighters are working six times the amount of mandatory overtime hours than they did before 2020.
“We’re doing roughly 2,000 hours of mandatory overtime every year and then in 2020, it jumps up,” Gonano said. “By 2021, we’re at about, basically almost 14,000 hours of mandatory overtime every single year. So just a drastic six-fold increase in the hours that are worked by the employees against their will.”
Gonano said it mainly comes from staffing shortages.
“I think it just has to do with chronic understaffing where you get to the heart of it,” he said. “… Sometimes, it’s very difficult to fill those slots and sometimes it isn’t when there are not enough people that are regularly on shift due to being on leave, being out sick, being injured, then we go into overtime.”
Gonano said it’s causing headaches in his firefighters’ personal lives.
“That’s difficult on you physically and mentally, but it’s also a stress on that employee’s family and their work-life balance,” he said. “… Sometimes, it means you’re going to miss, you know, plans that you have with your family to go somewhere else, to go out with the family for the day. It just means missed opportunities for family get-togethers and other things.”
He said this stress is on top of the trauma and 24-hour shifts that already come with the job.
“Firefighting and EMS is a difficult job under normal circumstances,” Gonano said. “The trauma that they’re exposed to, just the shift schedule and the work and the 24-hour shifts, it’s difficult on you just at a baseline, and when you factor in the mandatory overtime piece to it, it’s just one more stress on a very stressful job already and it causes some people to not want to be employed anymore.”
Without the mandatory overtime, he said some fire trucks would have to stop service because there aren’t enough people.
“It spills over into being a safety concern for the citizens,” he said. “And that’s that’s not where we want to get to. That’s what some cities do. Some localities do brownout trucks from time to time to help out with the mandatory stuff.”
That’s why he said firefighters continue to show up to serve their community.
“We are here to move towards danger while others are moving away,” Gonano said, “and it is not in our nature to just throw up our hands and say, you know, just shut these trucks down because we’d like to go home today.”
He said fire departments need to start hiring more people to relieve some of the stress.
“Better recruitment and retention and more employees to fill the spots that we have to fill, that’s number one,” Gonano said. “That’s the primary goal, is better recruitment, retention and more employees to help fill those spots.
“We certainly want to keep all the folks that do decide to come and work here, but the primary thing is hiring more people. It’s just chronic understaffing, which is the problem here. We didn’t get here overnight and we’re certainly not going to fix this overnight.”