THE PERILS OF AN UNREGULATED FIRE SERVICE
‘Ramshackle industry’ goes unregulated
The announcement last week from the Ontario coroner’s office of a coming inquest into two deaths got scant attention.
Yet the deaths — of firefighting student Adam Brunt in Hanover, Ont., last year and volunteer firefighter Gary Kendall in Point Edward, Ont., in 2010 — underscore the astonishing lack of regulation that exists across the dangerous profession.
Brunt and Kendall both died during what’s called cold-water rescue training, with the 30-year-old Brunt perishing after being trapped under ice in the fastflowing Saugeen River, and Kendall, 51, pulled under shore ice in the St. Clair River. He died in hospital the following day.
Both men were being trained by the same private company, Herschel Rescue Training Systems, owned by Brampton firefighter Terry Harrison.
In 2012, Harrison was acquitted by Ontario Court Judge Michael O’Dea on an occupational health and safety charge in connection with Kendall’s death, in some significant measure because the judge found that the Point Edward fire chief was technically still in charge.
A similar charge against the chief was dropped, with the municipality, which is near Sarnia, pleading guilty to failing to take precautions to protect a worker and being fined $75,000.
But in fact, Ontario Professional Fire Fighters Association (OPFFA) president Carmen Santoro told Postmedia in a phone interview Monday, rescue training “is that kind of ramshackle industry,” with virtually anyone able to hang out a shingle and even those who are properly qualified not held to any recognized standard.
And getting a job with a fire service is desperately competitive, Santoro said, with students such as Brunt (who was a firefighting student at Durham College, which wasn’t affiliated with the rescue training company) keen to get an edge on the hiring ladder by padding their resumés with such weekend courses.
“We’re the only first responders without a set of standards,” Santoro said. “We need standards, standards in training, standards in fire prevention … We accept risk as first responders, but in a training evolution?
“Training should be regulated, safe, and you should walk away alive.”
The problem isn’t confined to firefighter training, either.
Another recent coroner’s inquest, which this spring examined two fires that killed a total of seven people, heard that there are no mandatory provincial training standards for emergency call dispatchers, whose advice to panicked callers can be critical; fire prevention inspectors (one of whom, in one of the fires, appears to have misinterpreted the Ontario Fire Code); or public education programs.
Police and ambulance services, by contrast, have mandatory standards in comparable areas.
A key recommendation from the fire inquest jury was that Ontario’s community safety and correctional services ministry “make a regulation … requiring mandatory certification and training to recognized industry standards for all personnel whose primary job function is to perform fire inspections, public education and/ or communications.”
A government can do that, if not quite with the stroke of a pen, then with reasonable ease — as Community Safety Minister Yasir Naqvi and his staff are now doing with police services by undertaking a modernization of the Police Services Act.
This spring, for instance, the government passed a controversial regulation banning police from carding, or conducting street checks.
If the Police Services Act dates back to 1990, its fire service equivalent, the Fire Protection and Prevention Act of 1997, is only marginally less archaic.
When Brunt died, Santoro said, he appeared with the young man’s broken family and Oshawa NDP MPP Jennifer French at a Queen’s Park press conference to push for the inquest. He also attended several days of the recent inquest into the fires.
“It’s just so frustrating,” Santoro said. “At the fire inquest, I just felt like screaming: ‘We need standards; it’s dangerous!’ ”
He said that while he hopes the rescue death inquest — no date has been scheduled yet — may result in recommendations to stop the proliferation of unregulated companies offering training, in the interim, fire chiefs and services should stop “accepting those little padded resumés” from eager students.
Ice or cold-water rescue training isn’t even required by most fire departments.
“We’re not asking for the moon,” Santoro said. “We just want minimum standards. If you and I are both shocked, imagine how the families (of Brunt and Kendall) felt, to learn that there isn’t even a regulation.”