The sun had not yet risen when flames burst from the roof of a holiday home in Cadzand, a Zeeland seaside resort a few kilometers from the border with Belgium. But Jonathan de Keuninck (37), commander of the fire brigade in the village, slept through the night. His pager hadn’t gone off.
The day before he had sat down with the mayor and the regional commander in the barracks. Their message was simple: the post has too few volunteers. The barracks had to close.
As long as De Keuninck has been a firefighter, he has no idea whether the Cadzand fire brigade is struggling with a shortage of volunteers. When he knocked thirteen years ago, the team numbered around fifteen firefighters. Only ten left in 2020. And now the station still has four fully trained fire brigade volunteers.
Not that the departure of the volunteers came out of the blue. Because while the flow of tourists grew every summer, Cadzand slowly but surely emptied out. Since project developers discovered the seaside resort, hotels and luxury apartments have appeared along the boulevard and starters in particular have no longer found a place.
Jaap Vasseur (58), Jenda van den Hoven (21), De Keuninck, Dylan Balfoort (24), Gianni van Quekelberge (27) and Kees van Lambalgen (46) watched it with dismay. And they have no intention of simply resigning themselves to closing their post.
The tanker of the Cadzand barracks, in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen.
Photo Wouter Van Vooren
Sledgehammer blow
On a screen in the corner of the building, which has just been converted from a “glorified garage” into a full-fledged fire station, the dots behind the names of the team members present turn green. Cadzand’s post is set to ‘available’, in other words: there are enough volunteers in the area to respond.
Less than a month ago they had gone on a recruitment drive themselves, as they often do
In recent months that was more often not the case. That is why the control room did not alert the team to the fire in the village two weeks ago. With four people, says De Keuninck, that is simply “not responsible”.
Yet the firefighters had not expected that the mayor would make this announcement that evening, two weeks ago – the coffee had barely been poured. A “sledgehammer blow”. Vasseur: “We are working hard to get people here, we just had a renovation, and then you suddenly hear this.”
Keep strength
Less than a month earlier, the team itself had gone on a recruitment drive again. On Cadzandse Thursday, the annual village festival, although they were mainly among the tourists. They went door to door, but when that didn’t yield enough, De Keuninck entered companies unannounced to have a chat.
The team leader had more success there.
There were those like Van den Hoven, who moved from Breskens to Cadzand to strengthen the corps and is now well advanced in training. The post is in discussions with several candidates. And then there are ‘starters’ such as Van Lambargen, who lives in Zeist but regularly stays with family in Cadzand and then helps out.
But: that still does not reach the eighteen people who need a strength post according to the municipal council and the Zeeland Safety Region.
Marga Vermue, mayor of Sluis, also thinks it is a “worthless situation”. She praises the team’s efforts to attract volunteers. But, she says, a structural solution has “lost sight.” “We just need more people.” And according to her, Cadzand doesn’t have that. The aging seaside resort has seven hundred inhabitants.
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It’s not just the fire brigade that faces this problem. The Royal Dutch Rescue Society (KNRM) is also looking for volunteers. The baker could not find a successor. The football clubs of Cadzand and Schoondijke, located further away, joined forces because otherwise they would not be able to keep their heads above water.
“It is very difficult to attract volunteers,” says the mayor. “Although that is urgently needed.” Vermue would prefer to see a fire station in each of the seventeen centers of Sluis. “But that is a utopia.”
According to Van Lambalgen, policy is the basis for the shrinkage. “The changes in the area started twenty years ago. When the new recreation started, things started to change.” Now the beach has sixty thousand sun loungers in the summer. Add to that the day trippers and you are heading towards a hundred thousand visitors.
Without tourism, he says, Cadzand would probably have become even more impoverished. “But it is going a bit too far.”
In the barracks of Cadzand.
Photo Wouter Van Vooren
Rumor
If the thirteen mayors who form the board of the security region agree to the plan, the post will close this summer. The fire brigade volunteers started a petition. Vasseur: “I understand the dilemma very well. But to suddenly say: just stop it – that is not appropriate.”
According to Vasseur, with tens of thousands of tourists on summer days, you have to wait until something goes wrong. The mayor later emailed that she “understands” those concerns, but points out that surrounding police forces will be called out in the event of incidents, as is now the case on a regular basis. Vermue: “Of course you will have a slightly longer arrival time.”
It appeared, says Commander De Keuninck, that the fire had been started
On that early morning of Ascension Day, the first unit, from post Sluis, appeared on the scene after fourteen minutes. That is within the legal lower limit of eighteen minutes, but outside the safety region’s aim to arrive within thirteen minutes.
It looked, says De Keuninck, “every appearance” that the fire had been lit. Rumors soon spread among neighboring police forces that the closure of the post in Cadzand had something to do with the fire. The commander had asked his volunteers: was there anything he needed to know? We absolutely do not support such practices, he had said.
For the record: there is no concrete indication that any of the volunteers had anything to do with the fire. De Keuninck: “But one day the force has to close, the next night there is a fire. So I understand why people make that connection.”
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