How Canmore’s municipal fire department is staffed and organized, as well as its priorities, could see changes after town council accepted a new 10-year fire-management plan earlier this month.
The Fire-Rescue Master Plan was the result of a two-year process involving Dillon Consulting, which also prepared a staffing study completed in early 2016, and as a strategic planning document it sets the stage for how the department will be run over the next decade.
Steve Thurlow with Dillon told council the master plan has several recommendations and offers a comprehensive evaluation of all the services that Canmore Fire-Rescue provides, as well as how it is staffed.
“It is an opportunity to have a third party come in and do an assessment in relation to both your legislated responsibilities and municipal best practices,” he said. “I hope through this process we have had a number of conversations with senior administration and council to provide information on how different municipalities and services are provided across the country.
“It is certainly an opportunity to provide council and senior staff with an evidence-based report and in-depth analysis on options and strategies to deliver fire protection services.”
The four strategic priorities Thurlow put forward for council to consider adopting were: community risk assessment, prevention and education, sustaining the composite model, and that it be sustainable and cost effective.
The biggest change out of the recommendations is to how Canmore’s department uses three pools of employees to staff its daily, 24/7 emergency response operations. There are full-time firefighters, which belong to a union, casual career firefighters called in to backfill full-time staff and local paid response firefighters.
The paid response firefighters are members of the community who are able to leave work or home to respond to emergency situations when and as they arise. Thurlow said they are a vital part of the overall department and workplaces that provide the flexibility for those employees to leave when calls come in should be recognized.
“They are a very dedicated resource with a lot of years of experience and we want to build on that as a platform to go forward,” he said. “A part of that, I think, begins tonight with a recognition by council of how important it is to begin to reach out to town employers about how important paid response firefighters are to the ultimate safety of the community and seeking their support and participation in allowing their employees to be a part.”
Currently, Canmore has two firefighters on duty at all times and the fire chief and a deputy position that have management roles outside that rotation full time. When a firefighter is away, or backfilling for vacant positions is needed, the Town uses a pool of career casual firefighters throughout the province.
Thurlow said the Town should consider using the paid response local firefighters to fill those shifts, paying them at the union negotiated rate. He said it would take time and negotiations to shift the current composite staffing model to the one that is being recommended.
He said the recommendation involves reducing the number of career casual firefighters from 16 to 12 over the next six to 12 months, while increasing the number of paid response firefighters to 41 from 36 in the same time. Over the next five years, those numbers would go to four career casual and 51 paid response.
Two more staffing changes recommended were to create a peak time staffing model for summer months, when the department is busier, and creating two new ranks to help the para-military style response of the department.
“When there are emergencies, there needs to be a hierarchy and your current organizational structure does not have sufficient supervisors, in our opinion, so we identified different ranks in the organization as part of the paid response side that we think will balance those resources, and certainly from a health and safety perspective, mitigate the risk right now,” Thurlow said.
In addition to the full time chief and deputy, he recommended creating a senior officer on-call shift program, so that at any given time a major incident occurs, there is a senior firefighter on call that can take command of a scene.
Municipal fire departments, Thurlow said, are encountering fires that burn faster and hotter than they used to and the reason for that change in fire behaviour is largely related to building materials that use more composite materials and plastics.
The result is that flashover, the point where the temperature is high enough for everything to ignite simultaneously, happens sooner and that is important when you are a firefighter.
“It becomes very important that we emphasize public education and prevention,” Thurlow said, adding fire suppression should be the third line of defence and only as the fail-safe.
With education first, the second line of defence when it comes to strategically planning municipal fire response is using the fire code and building code safety standards, as well as enforcement.
He said the fire department should work with homeowners and property owners to reduce fire risks and prevent fires.
The master plan provides details of the Canmore Fire-Rescue department’s current response capabilities and options to improve those response times, as well as address growth in the community.
That includes facility needs, like the fact the current fire hall is too small for the needs of the department, which has significant storage needs for equipment. The plan recommends a facility strategy, as well as a formalized lifecycle replacement plan for equipment and including performance measures in the 911 dispatch contract the municipality currently has.
The equipment needs of the department are also connected to some of the specialized response capabilities that Canmore Fire-Rescue currently has as a result of the unique geographic area it is located in and its relative isolation.
Thurlow recommended Canmore partner with others to share those services and in its budgeting processes separate out those specialized functions to determine how much they cost in time, training and exercises to maintain.
“And make sure council and the community are aware of what is in that budget related to these services,” he said, adding the master plan recommends the department focus on training and certification related to fire prevention and fire suppression.
