TRAIN DELAYS COSTLY FOR FIRE CREWS, CHIEF SAYS
Overpass seen as solution
Saskatoon’s fire chief wants to eliminate daily train delays by building overpasses at railway crossings.
Chief Dan Paulsen said railway crossings at major intersections are interfering with fire crews’ response times.
Firefighters had to wait for a train on Tuesday evening as a fire burned on Avenue P. Another crew had to be dispatched from a different stat ion because a train was blocking the road at 20th Street and Avenue K.
Paulsen said that has to change.
“The long-term ( goal) would be to separate rail and road at choke points,” Paulsen said a news conference Wednesday. “That needs to be the future.”
Paulsen said he would like the city and the railways to work together on a way to move traffic around or over the trains. He said that probably means building overpasses or taking trains underground at critical intersections.
“How do we separate rail and road — not only (from) an emergency standpoint, which was evident today, but from the commerce side? How does an interruption affect the entire city?” Paulsen said.
The city collected data earlier this year that showed delays of nearly an hour at the intersection of 11th Street and Dundonald in Montgomery Place because of train crossings.
Paulsen has previously raised concerns that the Montgomery Place neighbourhood could become completely cut off from emergency personnel if every railway track was occupied.
He acknowledged it would be impossible to build an overpass at every intersection.
“There are 20,000 level crossings across the country and obviously we can’t separate all of them, so we need to figure out where are the choke points,” Paulsen said.
In the meantime, the fire department is working on a notification or “data-link” system that would warn dispatchers when trains are blocking critical roadways. There is no word on when that system will be in place, but assistant chief Morgan Hackl said it will be a critical first step to make sure trains don’t delay fire trucks.
He said because of the trains, it took crews a full seven minutes to respond to Tuesday’s fire. That is a full minute and 15 seconds longer than mandated.
“Luckily no one was in the home; the house was vacant,” Hackl said.
Tuesday night’s fire was the second suspicious fire in a vacant house in recent weeks. Hackl could not confirm whether Tuesday night’s fire was deliberately set.