The Kimberley Fire Department released their quarterly report for October to December, 2017, and findings show it was a busy quarter for staff.
At a regular City Council Meeting on Monday, Jan. 8, 2018, Council discussed the report from Fire Chief, Rick Prasad.
The report states that the Fire Department responded to 53 incidents over the four months, which Councillor Kent Goodwin says, should be expanded on.
“All of the incidents are summarized in one big bullet line, and that’s a huge amount of what they do; respond to fire alarms and fires and car wrecks,” said Goodwin. “[This report] makes it look like all we do is training and prevention. In terms of the presentation of the report it would be nice to expand on that [incidents] a bit. That’s the meat of it and that’s what the citizens want to know.”
Councillor Bev Middlebrook agreed, she asked if 53 was an average number of incidents.
The Bulletin followed up with Deputy Fire Chief, John Adolphe who says that 50 to 60 calls per quarter is a representative of average quarterly responses.
“In this past quarter, fire related calls (alarms, fires etc.), motor vehicle accidents, and utility-related emergencies (electrical and natural gas) made up the majority of our incident responses,” explained Adolphe.
“When I was with the call ranks here in Kimberley it was close to 200 responses per year, so it’s busy,” said Councillor Darryl Oakley.
With regards to fire prevention, 43 inspections were conducted, 10 business licences were reviewed, four fire hall tours were conducted and staff responded to four back yard burning complaints.
There were four Barbecue permits issued along with one slash pile permit, one permit for Camp Stone and five special occasion fire permits.
Two new fuels management applications were also submitted for funding in the Nordic Area and Forest Crowne, says the report, and some work on remaining projects was also completed.
In terms of training, a lot was done this past quarter. 684 hours of fire fighter training were invested. 48 hours of training were delivered to industrial training partners and 13 members completed eight different areas of training and upgrading from Frontline Leadership to Occupational First Aid (level three).
Councillor Sandra Roberts says she is impressed by the degree of training that is taking place.
“The number of members that are upgrading their command incident training is just awesome, it’s really important,” she said.
Oakley agreed, saying that the department should be congratulated.
“Kudos to the fire department for being a business within City Hall and running a very good enterprise there,” said Oakley. “Having revenues five times over their projected revenues is pretty amazing. Good for them for doing that, they need to be congratulated on that. That’s a lot of work and they’ve got a lot going on there.”
According to the report, Fire Department revenues for the fourth quarter of 2017 were $54,896, bringing the 2017 revenue total to $101,150. The projected training revenue was estimated at $20,000.
Mayor Don McCormick says that a large majority of the revenues come from the trainees that have been in place since June.
“With respect to the revenues, the estimated $20,000 was put in the budget before the details of the current training class were put in place so it’s a little bit underestimated,” McCormick said. “We’ve had 16 trainees that have been in place since June and they will be graduating in February. So the bulk of those revenues come from that training course.”
