Union warns fire truck shuffle could burn city

The City of Winnipeg has cut one of its vehicles from a busy inner-city fire station, sparking warnings that lives could be at risk.

In a letter to union members Sunday, the United Fire Fighters of Winnipeg said one of three vehicles at Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service Station 6 at 603 Redwood Ave. had been removed from service last week.

Union president Nick Kasper said the vehicle helped respond to more than 5,000 calls last year in the North End — calls that will now fall to the remaining two trucks, impacting their availability and response times.

“We’re going in the opposite direction that we need to be,” Kasper said Monday, noting staff who operated the vehicle were shuffled elsewhere.

“Our population has increased, the call volumes have increased, and instead of adding trucks, they’re taking them away.”

Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service deputy fire chief Scott Wilkinson confirmed the vehicle was pulled from Station 6 on June 11, in order to add more resources to fight the growing number of blazes downtown. He said the vehicle was a two-person squad unit, not a fire engine, and it largely handled medical calls, not fires.

“They’ve been around for many years, they were focused on medical calls in a time when we had different kinds of call volumes and fire suppression needs,” Wilkinson said Monday.

“We want to increase our (fire) suppression capacity in the core area because of the volume of fires, knowing the risk that we have in those neighbourhoods … we had to work within the resources and the staffing that we had in order to put the fire suppression resources where we needed them.”

“Our population has increased, the call volumes have increased, and instead of adding trucks, they’re taking them away.”–Nick Kasper

A four-person fire truck was also removed from Station 23 at 880 Dalhousie Drive, but it was replaced with an aerial ladder truck.

Kasper described the shuffle as “robbing Peter to pay Paul” — saying as many as 80 per cent of the calls the WFPS receives are medical calls.

“They’re trying to come up with creative solutions for the number of fires that we have occurring by moving the apparatus that they have around the city,” he said.

“They know that we need more staff, they know we need more trucks, but that’s a council decision … What we’re asking here is for city council to follow the recommendations that have been laid out in the reports provided over the last decade and invest in our service.”

Mayor Scott Gillingham said he trusted Fire and Paramedic Chief Christian Schmidt’s strategy on moving resources to best meet firefighting needs.

“I believe the chief is very strategic, and I appreciate his vision to use data analysis to allocate and reallocate resources accordingly … I’m always open to and wanting to have conversations with UFFW and certainly look forward to meeting with them to try to see how their needs can be addressed and responded to,” he said.

Kasper said he believes the shuffle will impact fire calls, as well as medical. He said the first responders to a structure fire on James Carleton Drive in the Maples area on Friday were from stations in downtown and the West End, resulting in a 14-minute response time to a high-priority incident. That’s more than triple the time the National Fire Protection Association considers standard for first arrivals.

“I’ve worked in rural departments in Manitoba, where you’re paid on call, and we had better response times,” he said.

“Never in my career, I’ve worked here almost 20 years, never have I seen a fire truck from downtown Winnipeg be the first truck to a fire in Winnipeg’s outskirts. That’s unacceptable.”

The Redwood Avenue station was closer, but its two remaining vehicles were preoccupied with other incidents, speaking to the level of need in the city, Kasper said.

“It’s not a complicated equation. You can’t do more calls with less trucks and expect your response times to get better, period.”

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca

UFFW letter