Twenty-five recommendations to improve Rocky View County’s (RVC) fire services will be addressed and brought back to council individually for approval.
The 2022 Fire Services Master Plan was accepted as information by RVC council during the April 5 meeting, after an hour-long presentation from emergency services personnel.
Randy Smith, RVC’s manager of fire services and emergency management, said with approval of the master plan, the intent would be to assemble a steering committee to look at all the recommendations moving forward.
He said with the report being accepted as information, every recommendation is based on council’s approval.
Division 5 Coun. Greg Boehlke moved to accept the plan as information, stating that every item will then require budget approval from council.
Jeffrey Carlisle, senior fire and emergency operations management specialist of Behr Integrated Solutions, who reviewed the fire services master plan, highly recommended the plan be reviewed and evaluated on an annual basis. He argued that would outline the immediate and future emergency service needs of the community.
Carlisle began his presentation to council by outlining the response data of RVC’s fire services. From 2016 to 2020, he said RVC saw 10,001 calls across all zones, with only 1,846 of the calls being for fire-related incidents.
The majority of RVC’s fire services calls were for medical responses, followed by motor vehicle collisions, alarms, and then fire.
Within an eight-kilometre radius of RVC’s fire stations, the 80th percentile response time benchmarks are set at 10 minutes with four firefighters, excluding the Irricana and Madden fire stations, which have an 80th percentile response time goal of 18 minutes.
According to the data provided during the presentation, response times from 2016 to 2020 exceeded the 10-minute mark across the board.
Carlisle added that with the current closure of 101 Street SW in Springbank, the area would see a decrease in emergency response service levels, with an increase of approximately 240 seconds. The response time once the interchange route is established was not part of the current report.
Compared to four other counties across the province with smaller populations but larger land areas, RVC fell in the mid-range when it comes to a cost per capita for fire services. The County currently spends seven per cent of its municipal budget on fire services, compared to 10 per cent in the County of Grande Prairie, six per cent in Clearwater County, 13 per cent in Foothills County, and five per cent in Yellowhead County.
“In our opinion, you have a very efficient fire service,” Carlisle told council.
Recommendations provided in the master plan are meant to improve operational effectiveness and efficiencies.
The recommendations to be addressed immediately included issues like completing a mission statement, improving communication with administration, staff, and the union, reviewing the equipment inventory, and developing a response matrix to identify which calls require assistance.
Smith explained the fire trucks in RVC are highly used and therefore have high mileages. A fire engine was recently replaced, but another early replacement is recommended.
“This is an ongoing process for our fleet where we have to assess each piece of equipment based on its use… It’s not uncommon for us to have well over 100,000 kilometres on a fire truck, which is not the norm in the industry,” Smith said. “We’re putting a lot of hard miles on our equipment and it’s impacting our replacement schedule.”
The majority of recommendations fell under the short-term category, to be addressed between one and four years. This includes completing a review of the firefighter water supply for new and current developments within the county and completing a community wildfire protection plan and FireSmart program.
The development of a fire prevention branch capable of supporting ongoing cyclical inspections of high-risk properties (instead of inspections based on complaints or requests) was also a short-term recommendation.
Carlisle stated industrial buildings have the highest fire code non-compliance and can pose major risks in industrial areas.
Another short-term recommendation is the building and development of an in-house live fire training facility. According to Carlisle, the Calgary training centre used to be readily accessible for RVC Fire Services, but that is no longer the case.
Other municipalities surrounding Calgary are also looking at constructing a building to use for fire training, which council suggested could be managed by a regional facility through cost-sharing agreements.
Several intermediate recommendations included undertaking a comprehensive risk analysis of individual station demand zones to identify policy gaps, as well as developing a comprehensive structural risk inventory program.
For a full list of recommendations included in the 2022 Fire Services Master Plan, go to the April 5 Council meeting agenda at rockyview.ca.
