A story in Tuesday’s paper drives home a point made Monday on this paper’s editorial page.

Jim Reeder, a Butler city firefighter and EMT, saved a baby girl’s life after a premature delivery Monday at a West End home.

Upon arriving at the scene, Reeder and fellow firefighters Lt. Don Crawford, Skip Lohr and Brad Sabolcik discovered that the baby was not breathing. Reeder utilized his training, clearing the baby’s airways with suction, rubbing the child’s chest and back and doing chest compressions.

Crawford said that Reeder handled the situation well, and that the child was taken by ambulance to a local medical facility.

“He did it very professionally and calmly,” Crawford said. “Everything went very well.” There are currently no updates on the infant’s condition, but we hope the child has recovered. Reeder and the other emergency responders at the scene deserve to be commended.

The incident occurred one day after the Eagle printed an editorial on the Butler City Council promoting three of its firefighters from part-time to full-time status, and the ongoing struggle to keep county and state fire departments fully staffed.

As the incident involving Jim Reeder proves, having staff members on-hand to respond to emergencies can be a matter of life and death.

In our previous editorial, we referenced Fire Engineering magazine’s statistic that 96 percent of Pennsylvania’s firefighters are volunteers as well as a 2018 legislative study that found the number of volunteer firefighters in the state is less than one-sixth of what it was 40 years ago.

The primary reason for this decrease in the number of firefighters is that many departments are relying on people who are unpaid or receive part-time wages. As a result, more than 50 percent of the state’s volunteer firefighters are over the age of 40.

The state’s firefighter — and emergency responder — shortage has been referred to as a “crisis.” People like Jim Reeder have skills and training that can be used to save lives during situations in which every second counts.

In Reeder’s case, he’s a paid firefighter in Butler. But other municipalities can’t afford to so. So, what happens in those places when there are more emergencies at any given moment than there are responders?

Some communities have offered such incentives as tax credits or uniting several municipalities into a cooperative that would station a few paid firefighters throughout the region. These are both good ideas. But communities across Pennsylvania and the state’s legislators ought to come up with further incentives — financial or otherwise — to encourage young people to enlist as firefighters or emergency responders.

We need more Jim Reeders, and the state needs to figure out how to recruit them.