Newly-graduated firefighters to staff south-side units

Thirty freshly-minted Edmonton firefighters will staff fire rescue services on Edmonton’s south side as early as Sunday.

Members with the fire service’s recruit class 148 — all dressed in red and nearly all sporting moustaches — graduated in a ceremony at City Hall on Friday afternoon. They trained together between February and June.

Edmonton Fire Rescue Services Chief Ken Block said the class is the first of two the service will take in this year. They start work on Sunday in a southwest rescue unit that will go into service at Station 19 in Callingwood. Twenty will staff the rescue unit, while another 10 will replace retiring firefighters.

Another class of 16 to 20 firefighters is expected to graduate toward the end of the year, Block said.

He said joining the fire service is a calling. “It’s the realization you’re becoming part of a profession that is greater than the individual,” he said. “That’s doesn’t come naturally to most people, but … for firefighters, the type of people we attract, it’s like a calling. They really do want to serve.”

Class 148 was notably all male. In March, 88 of Edmonton Fire Rescue’s 1,284 full-time employees were women, just nine of them firefighters.

Block said the service is working to improve the number of women on the force, including through a cadet program aimed at high school students.

“This will translate eventually into some much greater numbers of female firefighters,” he said

The fire service recently opened Station 30 in northeast Edmonton. It has plans to open two more in the coming years that will need to be staffed.