Fire Review

Saturday, 9 November 2013 06:00

The Mayor and Fire Chief weigh in on some of the recommendations to come out of the Fire Service Report Thursday night.

Woodstock's fire department could be going from 48 to 44 full time firefighters.

During Thursday night's council meeting, CAO David Creery made the recommendation on behalf of a steering committee saying the minimum number of firefighters needed is eight at any given time, so having eleven in a platoon instead of 12 would still provide three additional firefighters as a buffer for vacations and holidays.

Mayor Pat Sobeski says the reduction of 4 firefighters is only a recommendation.

"It's up to council first of all to decide what staffing level we're going to have and there was again, a whole number of options. Council, at the next council meeting will decide which one to go to, and assuming we pick that recommendation, then we'd ask staff to come back with a way that it could be implemented."

Despite it's proximity to the highway, centralizing the Parkinson Road firehall could help the department cover more geographic ground in four minutes.

As we told you Friday, a steering committee has recommended the city look at the cost of moving the Parkinson Road fire hall to James and Springbank in order to be able to service a larger portion of the City in a shorter period of time.

Fire Chief Scott Tegler says currently there are parts of the City that are hard to get to within four minutes from the current Parkinson location.

"The city, the way it's made up now we have some obstacles as we begin to grow obviously to the north of us with the Pittock lake there, there's no easy way to get there. We have to kind of monitor and keep an eye on future expansion of the city and things we can do to be able to respond there or increase fire safety activities."

Mayor Pat Sobeski says moving the hall is totally separate from a plan to add a third hall in the north end.

"If we were to add a third new station, it would also require the hiring of 16 new firefighters. In the 2014 budget, again if the recommendations are approved, then city council would ask staff to do a report to indicate what the cost would be to relocate the station."

While there were many recommendations Thursday night, a less controversial item caught the attention of Mayor Pat Sobeski.

"I think the key thing is there's a change in focus and the Fire Marshall's Office, the Ministry at Queen's Park there is now a greater emphasis toward the prevention of fires and that's what I think was the main focus of (Thursday) night's report."

Fire Chief Scott Tegler says a lot of the operational suggestions the consultant elaborated on weren't a surprise to him.

"A lot of those things discussed about prevention and safety and education activities and programs we currently do do those in the community. It's stated there's an evolution of growing those activities and trying to focus them as we grow as a municipality and identify those areas in our community that we maybe need to make a stronger target. "

The recommendations will be discussed further by council at their next meeting November 21.