The North Saanich Fire Department has launched a new pilot project which is aimed at reducing response times overnight and increasing the level of service it provides to residents.
As of April 1, the department will have one firefighter and one officer staffing its McTavish Road fire hall overnight on weekdays between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m., and during weekends.
They will be paid a stipend for being at the station, while the remainder of the mostly volunteer department will remain on-call 24 hours a day at their homes, getting paid only when responding to calls as the department has been doing all along.
”When the call comes in, all the pagers still go off and everyone starts heading to the hall. The difference is the two people staffing the hall are able to be out the door within minutes,” said department Chief John Trelford. “Times are changing, expectations have changed and are greater, so this is just a progressive move for us as a department.”
The pilot will run for a year and the impacts of the change will be evaluated continuously, Trelford said, with adjustments made on the fly as lessons are learned. Already though, he said it has proven beneficial.
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On Wednesday (April 12), a call for a structure fire came in just after 6:30 a.m., and Trelford said the fire was able to be contained to the garage, saving the home, thanks to how quickly crews were able to arrive on scene. That initial response was made by the overnight on-call crew.
When calls come in overnight, the two firefighters at the station will respond immediately with their truck. The rest of the crews will first respond from their homes to their station to collect their equipment and trucks before heading to the scene, as was the case before the project launched.
”Even if it is just to speed up that initial size-up so that we know exactly what it is we are dealing with, it’s great,” said Trelford.
He said even though that initial two-person crew would not be able to start a full-on attack of the fire until backup arrives, even just being able to start getting water on the fire from outside a structure can be effective in at least limiting its spread, and can often even extinguish smaller fires outright.
The move sees the department follow in the footsteps of other composite fire departments in the region like Colwood Fire Rescue and the Sidney Fire Department. Departments which have a mostly volunteer department with a small number of full-time paid career staff – six career firefighters and 37 volunteer in the case of North Saanich – have recently introduced similar models where otherwise unpaid volunteers are paid in exchange for staffing the fire hall during off hours.
Trelford said the expectation is after the pilot ends in 2024, the model will become permanent with whatever refinements are made during its initial year.
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