EASE TIMES TO RESPOND TO FIRES
City council finds itself wrestling with a classic dilemma. It would be prohibitively costly to build fire halls in sparsely populated new communities, but if development is approved without them, it means fire crews will take longer to arrive at the scene of an emergency.
A city committee has rejected the concerns of fire Chief Steven Dongworth and agreed to extend fire response standards from seven to 10 minutes in communities that are being developed. The new guidelines will go to council for final approval on March 19, but they do make sense, despite the well-founded arguments of councillors who oppose the plan.
The change is supported by city administration and the development community and is being counted on to meet the need for more housing. A city report says relaxing fire response times could make approximately 7,000 hectares available for development, enough to house up to 350,000 people.
A review found no other Canadian municipalities delay subdivisions on the grounds that they do not meet fire response standards.
Coun. Druh Farrell fears the proposal would create a double standard for all emergency services — not just fires — in new neighbourhoods.
“The fire department is very often the first responder in an emergency and that can be a health emergency, that can be a heart attack, that can be a child choking, and so to reduce the conversation to fire is unfortunate,” Farrell said earlier this week. “I don’t accept that there are different levels of Calgarians.”
The unfortunate reality is many new communities are initially short of amenities, including libraries, shops and recreation facilities. It is difficult to provide such services when only a handful of homes line freshly paved streets. The same, sadly, is true of fire halls.
Indeed, Dongworth concedes the response time to calls on Calgary’s outskirts is already longer than the city’s standard, typically eight minutes and 25 seconds. That’s just a little better than the 10-minute target councillors are proposing for future new communities.
Council should relax the fire response time, but it should also heed Farrell’s wise words. We don’t want to have “different levels of Calgarian” in perpetuity. As communities are built out, fire halls should be constructed in a timely manner. As the councillor notes, the crews are first responders and deal with much more than just fires. The sooner they’re able to reach new communities, the better.