Volunteer Firefighter Spotlight – Jamie Sawyer

April 23, 2024

Jamie Sawyer’s life changed the night before his 16^th birthday. It was December 1990, and the members of Mullins Fire Department voted him onto the department as a Junior Firefighter.

“Of course, he (fire chief) knew all my family, and he asked me, ‘What makes you wanna get on the fire department?’” Jamie recalled the events leading up to him joining the department,
“I said, ‘I don’t really know’… Next thing you know, ‘Well, come back tonight at 7 for a meeting,’ so I came back that night and have been here ever since.”

Jamie, now volunteering at Dillon County Station 3, has been around for long enough to have seen many changes across many different facets of the fire service. The timeline for change seems to only speed up as the years on the job go by.

“One of the biggest things that I’ve noticed is the training has changed a lot, the terminology, the equipment, the science behind everything,” Jamie said. “The gear is lighter, more efficient.”

In the 30+ years Jamie served as a volunteer firefighter, researchers and scientists have connected the dots between firefighting and cancer. Firefighter cancer isn’t a problem only career firefighter face; cancer can’t tell the difference between who’s career and who’s volunteer.

“Back then, we thought it was cool to have dirty gear, and you weren’t doing your job if you weren’t dirty,” Jamie remarked about the culture shift experienced in the fire service when it comes to taking care of PPE.

Time offers perspective on our life experiences. After over three decades of volunteering, Jamie’s perspective on volunteering has changed since that night in December 1990 when he wasn’t sure what he was signing up for.

“To me it’s about the community and the people we serve,” he continued, “It’s more or less going out and helping your neighbor.”

South Carolina is littered with map-dot towns supported by volunteer firefighters like Jamie—“Everything’s not big city fire,” he noted. “Combination and rural departments depend on volunteers,” he said, calling volunteers the ‘backbone.’

When asked if he could go back to the night before his 16^th birthday and do it all again, Jamie answered immediately, “All day, every day.”