By the 1990s, the face of the community was changing in another way. It was aging. Most of the residential development in Bower Hill happened between 1947 and 1960. The people who bought those houses had raised their children there, but now those children were going off to start families and find housing of their own. And the people who occupied the housing in Bower Hill had no intention of leaving; they were (and still are) quite happy to live in a safe, convenient, comfortable neighborhood with good services and reasonable taxes. Young people had to look elsewhere for homes. This had two obvious effects on the fire department. First, firefighting is mostly an occupation for the young. When the community doesn’t include many young people, volunteer firefighters are hard to come by. Second, the elderly require more emergency services than the young. Ambulance call volumes continued to grow every year, until it became obvious that they would soon exceed the capabilities of the decreasing trained volunteer pool.

Bower Hill wasn’t the only local department to face this problem; it was common throughout the South Hills of Allegheny County. Departments began to pool resources and enter into joint operations to continue to give the level of service the residents needed. Bower Hill joined forces with Glendale Hose Company No. 1 and incorporated Scott Township EMS (STEMS), owned equally by the two departments, and hired full time and part time EMTs and Paramedics to provide 24 hour-a-day ALS coverage. Each department provided an ambulance to STEMS and the durable medical equipment to stock it. Bower Hill provided its latest ambulance, a 1994 Ford “Type III” ambulance with a KJT Sentinel ambulance module. Members of the Bower Hill and Glendale departments were given first consideration for jobs as the initial employees, though application was open to anyone with the requisite certification.

The staffing problem was somewhat less acute with firefighting. While there were fewer young adults in the department, the overall membership was stable, and since the fire call volume remained low, it was adequate to the task. Equipment still needed to be replaced, and when it was, it was replaced with something more efficient and capable. The 1969 pumper, which had been extensively rebuilt in 1981, was replaced in 1992 with a new Sutphen Custom pumper of 1500 GPM capacity, and the 1973 mini-pumper and rescue, which had also been heavily modified in 1985, was sold at the same time. In 1995, the department added a utility and squad vehicle, an unmodified Chevrolet 4-wheel drive crew-cab pickup truck, which proved invaluable for many purposes. With this latest addition, the entire Bower Hill fleet was now diesel-powered and equipped with automatic transmissions. Firefighters’ protective gear was replaced as needed, and new PBI Aramid coats replaced the older Nomex/Kevlar models.

Allegheny County finally adopted 911 as the universal emergency phone number in the 1990s, and a new fire radio system followed. The old VHF Low Band Frequency of 33.76MHz was frequently jammed by electronic interference from neon lights and atmospheric “skip” signals, and was replaced with a new UHF system which incorporated dispatch and fireground radio channels. The dispatch center continued at the Scott Township Police Department, but was now operated as "Southwest Regional Dispatch." This operation would later be moved to the Allegheny County Communications Center in Pittsburgh, where the Southwest Desk was the first to begin operations. A new county-wide numbering system for all fire stations was adopted. Stations were numbered alphabetically by municipality, beginning with Station 101 (Aleppo Township). Bower Hill became Station 255. The old number “4” was soon removed from all apparatus and replaced with the new “255” designation. Helmet shields soon followed. Older coats remained unchanged, but new replacements all sported the new number.