Selling the Solution: The City prepares its case for auxiliaries

With the issue of fire fighter and public safety a hot issue in the last couple of weeks, the City of Prince Rupert began its campaign to hire six people as auxiliary fire fighters to shore up the departments full time crews. Having earlier in the week expressed its outrage at the reports in the Daily News about the staffing situation, the City's plans now seem to be to provide a bit of information to the public about the departments desire to hire on auxiliary on call firefighters.

The auxiliary plan has long been in the works, but only recently reappeared as a going concern and now one moving to the recruitment process.

The Daily News provided an examination of what the city hopes to achieve with its auxiliary plans and how the previous attempt to recruit auxiliaries found that some of them left town to pursue full time offers in other centres.

While the city goes about its plan, what remains to be seen is what the reaction of the public will be to the project. The staffing issue that has percolated in town the last few weeks has proven to be a hot topic; we suspect that the bid to add auxiliaries to that mix will likewise be the subject of much discussion.

FIRE DEPARTMENT SEEKS AUXILIARIES
City begins new drive to find six people to bolster its full-time crews
By James Vassallo
The Daily News
Friday, September 29, 2006
Page One

The city is looking for six new auxiliaries to supplement Prince Rupert’s full-time firefighters.

“We’ve compared other communities that have used volunteers and paid on-calls and provide a good level of protection, and in some cases they actually provide a larger trained fire force that’s available in significant emergencies,” said Mayor Herb Pond.

When you look at Prince Rupert, we’ve got a very highly trained force of full-time firefighters but we don’t have any depth for replacing them.

“Very clearly, we need to provide the right level of protection and do it in the most cost-effective manner.”

Pond cites examples like the large blazes at J. S, MacMillan and the Elizabeth Apartments as places where additional manpower may be invaluable.

“We had firefighters that were going back to the hall to grab a few hours sleep before returning to the fire and by the end, we had a pretty exhausted workforce,” he said of the incidents. “Part of having a few more people trained as paid-on-call is an opportunity to create more depth.”

This will be the second attempt at recruiting additional help at Prince Rupert Fire Rescue. The first round of recruitment saw six paid-on-calls trained, however four have since left including two who were hired away as full-time paid firefighters in other cities.

“It’s too bad that we lose those trained bodies but it’s great for them and it speaks highly for the training they’re receiving that other fire departments are eagerly snapping them up,” said Pond. “Without doubt, there is going to be more turnover amongst the paid-on-calls than the full-time staff, but somewhere in there we hope to reach a balance.”

Fire Chief Ron Miller explained there’s a full time training program the on-calls have to go through including live fire training to prepare the on-calls for fighting fires. The process takes about three months.

“We have got to get them to a stage where they have enough experience and training that they’re qualified to work on a fire scene,” said Miller.

“I’m hoping to get the remaining two to the live fire training early this fall.”

Those recruits will also eventually be offered training that will help deal with more specialized tasks such as dealing with hazardous materials.

“There are some special skills that are required,” said the fire chief.

“Our career staff already has special HAZMAT training and that’s part of the training that will eventually be made available to (paid on-calls).

“As they go through their training, as long as we can keep the dollars in place and get the specialized training in for these people we’ll bring everybody up to the operations level.”

While the career staff will remain the initial response crew, the paid-on-calls will provide more hands to fight major fires, said Miller.