Fire Hall Moving?

Friday, 8 November 2013 06:00

A Fire Service Review finds the Parkinson Road fire hall may not be in the most optimal location to provide the best level of service

By moving one of the City's fire halls, the department could increase the geographical area they could reach in ten minutes by ten percent.

That's just one of the findings that came out of a lengthy presentation Thursday night at City Council as part of the Fire Service Review.

Project Manager at Dillion Consulting, Steve Thurlow says right now they can achieve an initial response of 41 percent of the City's geography within 4 minutes or less travel time.

"They're doing the best they can with the resources they have. What the analysis identified was the Parkinson Road station may not be in the most optimal location to provide the best level of initial response particularly to the residential occupancy that are clearly the most vulnerable occupancy the fire department has to protect."

City Chief Administrative Officer David Creery says a steering committee which helped with the report recommend looking at the cost of moving the Parkinson Road fire department to James and Springbank and refer those costs to the 2014 budget.

Thurlow also laid out several other recommendations for to City Council to improve fire services in the City including; adding an additional fire inspector, assigning a Training Coordinator to each of the department's platoons, offering courses on leadership and management training while looking at ways the department can partner with other communities when it comes to some of their special levels of service like confined space rescue.

Thurlow tells Heart FM if they can improve the first two lines of defence, being prevention and education, they can we have a positive impact on the outcome of the number of fires they have.

"By providing more prevention, more education, more fire code compliance, even with the existing level of resources, we can find some efficiencies and improve the overall level of fire protection services."

The City will put the report on their website later Friday morning for review and written comment with a deadline of Friday, November 15.