About 100 volunteers came through during the week, with 40 or more on site on a given day. They included ICS-qualified agency staff, National Guard members, firefighters and EMTs, county emergency planners, university forestry and engineering students, and industry professionals. Shifts started at about 6 a.m., noon and 6 p.m., with a night shift from 10 p.m., and the volunteer coordinator met each new shift to onboard it.
The volunteer pipeline:
Online interest intake form; flyers carried a QR code to it
Background check through the education sponsor
Mandatory information session: two live sessions and a recording
Signed volunteer conduct attestation and acknowledgment of abuse-reporting requirements
Optional photo and media release
Shift assignment, and an onboarding brief at the start of every shift
The volunteer tracker shows how compressed this was. Most clearances landed between May 18 and June 6, with National Guard members cleared in a batch on June 6, just over two weeks before camp.
Ari Nordquist of the Department of Emergency Management spent the week as a floater across logistics, safety and communications. Asked what fires she had been putting out, she listed radios that needed charging, snacks on day one, hydration, a missing printer cable, and walking the site for hazards. Jennifer Stanislaw, the paramedic-firefighter who led the safety village, said she and her co-lead arrived without a clear definition of their job and built one: a first-aid tent, then prevention, then hourly ice and electrolyte rounds by Wednesday.
Lessons from year one:
Separate two kinds of volunteer. Fill command and general staff with committed people who stay the whole week. Shift volunteers can surge in for set-up, activities and overnight coverage.
Brief every shift on and off. When schedule changes pulled the coordinator away, some volunteers sat without direction.
Plan for fatigue. Provide sleeping space for staff and volunteers too tired to drive home safely. One leader called fatigued driving the most significant safety concern of the week.
Overnight coverage of two or three awake adults and a locked gate was enough for site security. It was not enough for behavior inside student tents (see “How supervision works at an overnight camp”).