Photo: Shaun Penner

By Shaun Penner

County Fire

County Regional Fire Services sees uptick in calls in early 2019

Aug 27, 2019 | 5:30 AM

It’s was a busy first half of 2019 for County of Grande Prairie Regional Fire Services.

Fire Chief Dan Verdun presented to council Monday as part of a bi-annual update, which showed area fire departments responded to 930 calls for service between January and June of this year.

Those results come from all five County fire stations, as well as from its regional partners from Beaverlodge, Wembley, Sexsmith and Hythe. Nearly half of those calls, or 423 total, were made to the Clairmont and Dunes stations, which is set to surpass the 829 calls made to those stations in all of 2018. That number from 2018 was also a jump from the 690 calls in 2017.

Though Verdun sees the increase in the number of calls for service, he isn’t alarmed by it at this time.

“The increase is not a dramatic spike, and we are seeing slight increases across all call types,” said Verdun. “I think a lot of it is probably driven by overall growth in the region, more transient people coming through. Again, we are the hub (in Clairmont), so we do see a lot of additional public here, above and beyond our actual rate payers.”

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“I think this is just really normal growth and what we anticipate is just regular business for us.”

Numbers show that of the 423 calls to the Clairmont and Dunes stations, 47% of those were classified as MCR, or Medical Co-Response. Motor vehicle collisions and alarms made up another 30 % of those calls combined.

Where they saw less activity across the County was in calls for brush and grass fires, which has led to a quiet wildfire season in our area. That hasn’t meant that County resources weren’t heavily utilized during this year’s wildfire season, as many resources have been deployed to High Level, Paddle Prairie and La Crete to help battle the Chuckegg Creek wildfire.

Verdun says that the County was well positioned to help other areas out this year, but they are always preparing themselves, should the County be put in a similar situation.

“I mean, if the same example from this year happened and we were in the middle of our own fire season, what we were able to provide to our neighbours would have been minimized dramatically,” said Verdun. “Because, at the end of the day, we have to worry about our needs first and foremost and our neighbours, unfortunately, become secondary.”

Verdun says in the report that he believes that their deployment to the northern part of the province is the longest sustained deployment by Regional Fire Services, surpassing Slave Lake and Fort McMurray. Crews and resources were first called into action by the High Level Fire Department on May 12, and to this day have resources up there to help fully extinguish the fire.

The Chuckegg Creek wildfire was declared under control just back on Friday. The blaze has burned over 350,000 hectares since mid-May.