The grey-blue house on a quiet street in Burton looks like a classic family home — with a two-car garage, a crimson-red front door and a peek-a-boo view of Quartermaster Harbor.

But instead of housing a family, the 2,200-square-foot residence stands as a new effort on the part of Vashon Island Fire & Rescue (VIFR) to reduce emergency-response times to the outer reaches of the Island.

These days, two young men — volunteer emergency medical technicians or EMTs — live in the four-bedroom home, situated a block away from the Burton fire station. When a call comes in, they don their gear and hustle to the station, where they climb into an aid car and rush to the scene.

It’s a scenario that routinely shaves two or three minutes off the response time to the southern end of the Island and a minute or two to parts of Maury, VIFR officials said. And while that might not seem like much, fire officials say, those few minutes could mean life or death to someone who’s having a heart attack or is in need of oxygen.

“Two minutes can make a huge difference,” said Candy McCullough, who chairs the fire commission. “I think it’s definitely worth it.”

The residency program, as it’s called, is part of a larger effort on VIFR’s part to reduce response time by strengthening volunteer participation in the department, one of the few in King County that still draws heavily on the support of volunteer firefighters and EMTs.

The two men at the Burton house, Cody Plancich, 22, and Ross Copland, 21, are housed at VIFR’s expense. In exchange, Plancich and Copland — both trained EMTs who also work part-time as ambulance drivers in the Seattle area — have to be on call 10 times a month for 12-hour shifts.

The deal works for them, the two men said as they sat in the living room of the spacious home, called the Bennedsen House in honor of Lt. Robert Bennedsen, a volunteer firefighter who was killed in Afghanistan in July 2010. Both men are on their way toward becoming professional firefighters and paramedics and welcome the experience the residence program provides.

“You just get better and better,” Plancich, a 2007 graduate of Vashon High School, said of the experience.

The fire department also benefits, VIFR officials said. Assistant Fire Chief George Brown said he’d like to see even more EMTs and firefighters spread out across the Island. Parts of the Island are still outside of the five-mile range considered the gold standard in emergency response. A station with living quarters further southwest would be better, as well as another on Maury.

But the Bennedsen House is a step in the right direction, he said — a good investment for the district and one that has enabled it to draw on the services of two promising young firefighters who cost the district very little.

“Their eagerness and their willingness to learn the job and learn to do it right is refreshing to me,” Brown said. “They’re not afraid of work.”

Brown, who came to the department from Pullman, Wash., has been working assiduously on the district’s volunteer program since his arrival two and a half years ago, trying to enhance and improve a part of the district considered critical to its success. His changes have been far-reaching, some say.

Volunteers no longer simply sign up and then continue on with their lives, awaiting a page that they might — or, more significantly, might not — be able to answer. Instead, as a result of a program Brown instituted, volunteers now have to agree to three 12-hour shifts a month or nine per quarter, with their stipend slightly higher if they staff that shift from the fire station rather than their own home.

He also instituted a Vashon-based academy, or training program, that volunteer EMTs have to take — an additional requirement for Vashon volunteers, who also take a state-mandated EMT class.

The need for the changes was apparent to Brown shortly after he arrived at the district.

“When I first got here the volunteer system amounted to, ‘Come if you can.’ It wasn’t working,” he said.

The district always had enough paid staff on duty to respond to the first emergency call that came in. But on nights with back-to-back calls, which is not unusual for the small department, VIFR officials would often have to send out repeated pages to get enough volunteers to show, Brown said.

“Without volunteers,” he added, “one call wipes us out.”

What’s more, he said, some of the volunteers were not keeping up on their training. The agency, he noted, “used to take any volunteer who signed up.” Now, he said, the district focuses on “quality over quantity” in its volunteer ranks.

The district lost volunteers in the course of the makeover. About 20 dropped from the rolls, in part because they couldn’t manage the shift requirements and extra training demands, Brown said.

But the program, now a year old, is delivering the results Brown was looking for, he said.

The district currently has 47 active EMT/firefighter volunteers — 26 who live off-Island and 21 from on-Island. Another 10 Islanders volunteer as support personnel. As a result of the shift requirements each volunteer has to keep, the district is now much closer to what Brown and others consider full staffing levels — enough personnel to cover three back-to-back calls.

Last year, Brown said, volunteer EMT/firefighters helped to staff 82 percent of the agency’s weekday shifts and 84 percent of its weekend shifts.

“This is a big change,” Brown said.

Some of the commissioners say they miss the old days, when the volunteer ranks were filled largely by Islanders motivated by a sense of civic duty. The new system, said Commissioner Ron Turner, has turned VIFR into “a recruiting spot for the IAFF” (the International Association of Fire Fighters).

McCullough, a volunteer herself until she became a commissioner a year ago, said she also wishes the volunteer program still had that homegrown feeling.

“I was happy to have our troops in the past that we could call on locally,” she said.

The culture is different, she added, now that VIFR’s volunteers are more likely to be young men and women who see it as a stepping stone in their career. “They’re not like the typical Vashon volunteer,” McCullough said. “They want jobs. It’s built into the culture.”

At the same time, both Turner and McCullough said, they accept the fact that Vashon — one of the few districts in the region that uses volunteers anymore — had to beef up its program.

“We don’t just need bodies anymore. We need people who are trained and qualified,” Turner said.

“The world has changed,” he added. “And it’s hard for some people to accept.”

Some of the longtime volunteers who have stayed with the program, meanwhile, say they’re pleased by the changes. Jill Bulow, a volunteer EMT who joined the department six years ago, said she doesn’t mind the shift requirements and was happy to get the additional training.

When she first started at the district, Bulow said, “It was disorganized. We were learning good things, but different things from different people, and it was confusing.”

Now, she said, “We’re getting very clear and thorough training, and that’s why I joined.”

As for the two young men staffing the Bennedsen House, they’re also pleased by the new approach — especially the quid pro quo that enables them to live rent free in exchange for receiving considerable on-the-job training.

The district, they believe, is getting a good deal. The two men said they work more shifts than VIFR requires. They also take care of the house — last weekend, they pruned the fruit trees in the fenced backyard — and help out their Burton neighbors when needed.

Indeed, they said, their lives are pretty much consumed by work — between their volunteer shifts at VIFR and their paid jobs with Tri-Med, an ambulance company serving Kent, Burien and Highline. But they’ve got little choice, they said, if they want to break into the competitive and ultimately well-paying field of professional firefighting.

“It’s the life we want, to get that good career,” Copland said. “We work and work and work. But that’s what you’ve got to do.”

The Bennedsen House in Burton: An experiment in emergency response

Vashon Island Fire & Rescue has been trying for years to find a way to serve the far-flung corners of the Island — to address the joke that the agency could always save a foundation in the case of a fire, but that was about it.

Its new residency program, where two young men live at a house in Burton around the corner from one of its fire stations, is a step toward trying to find an economic solution to that problem, the fire department says.

The agency paid $437,000 for the house in June 2010. Now, when it receives a call from the south end in the middle of the night, the two volunteers — Cody Plancich and Ross Copland, both trained EMTs — can get there a tad faster than their counterparts at Station 55.

The four-bedroom house often has two other volunteers staying overnight there, rotating through on an as-needed basis. As a result, says fire Commissioner Ron Turner, “We’ve got improved response.”

The agency could have an even faster response, however, if it could station an aid car at the house — something not allowed under current zoning because the house is considered a residence, not “a primary (emergency) response site,” said Assistant Fire Chief George Brown. As it is now, when a call comes in, Plancich and Copland have to hop in their VIFR-issued SUV, zip around the corner to the station, park their SUV and jump into the aid car.

The two men are proud of how quickly they’re able to get to the station. From the moment they receive a page to the moment they step into the aid car takes about two minutes, they said.

But fire commissioners want the response to be even faster. Turner said he plans to ask the commission to seek a waiver from the zoning law so that the department can park an aid car at the house. Brown, too, wants to eventually seek a variance, though he wants to wait until the time is right.

“I think it’s very doable, but timing’s everything,” Brown said.

The district paid cash for the house, using funds from its reserves. Turner said it made considerable sense to purchase the house, in light of the low real estate prices on Vashon these days.

Ultimately, Brown said, the district hopes to build a new fire station, replete with sleeping quarters, in the southwest quadrant of the Island — a location that would better enable the district to serve the south end and west side of the Island. But such an undertaking would cost millions of dollars, he noted, and the district is far from ready to take on such a project.

“To me, it’s an investment. It’s a no-lose proposition,” Brown said of the Bennedsen House.

Turner, who championed the idea of the house in Burton, said he wants to expand the residency program so that the district can better serve Dockton. Just a few weeks ago, he looked at a house not far from the district’s small station in Dockton, which — like the structure in Burton — is not big enough to handle live-in firefighters.

The house he found in Dockton, he said, was too big and expensive, but he plans to continue the search.

“We’re always looking,” he said.

Meanwhile, neighbors of VIFR’s house in Burton say they’re happy to have two young EMTs in their neighborhood.

“I totally love having them there,” said Nici Dawber, who lives across the street. “Imagine if we did have a fire. … They’d be here right away.”