With the retirement of Fire Rescue Chief Russell Inouye in the New Year, Bob Fulton will move from Deputy to Chief on January 15.
Squamish Chief reporter Jennifer Thuncher caught up to Fulton for a chat about his new position, his goals, and the challenges of Squamish.
Q: Was being fire chief something you dreamed of when you were a little boy?
A: No, when I was a little boy I wanted to be a professional hockey player – like a lot of other little boys. I wanted to be a firefighter from my teens.
I pursued it a bit when I was in my early twenties, but it never worked out. I moved to Squamish in 1988 and I met a fellow who was a volunteer firefighter. I really wanted to get involved in something to give back to the community and I thought that would be great. So, I joined as a volunteer, and the rest is history.
Q: What do you love about your work as a firefighter?
A: I like the challenge, the excitement. The camaraderie of the group and the satisfaction of knowing you are doing something to help the community.
Q: What are the biggest challenges about Fire Rescue in Squamish?
A: It is pretty diverse. You know, we respond to the fires and the usual things that most people relate to firefighters, but we respond a lot to motor vehicle accidents.
In the past there were a lot more head-ons, before the highway was upgraded, before the Olympics. We get called in for a lot of rescues, like mountain bikers and hikers. You just never know what you are going to get called to. Every day is different.
Q: And so now as chief, you will be responsible for the deputy chief, the fire captain, four career firefighters and close to 60 volunteer firefighters. How is the actual day-to-day job of chief different from being a deputy?
A: When you are the chief, the buck stops there. The operation of the fire department, the administration of the fire department — you are it. If you are the deputy chief you can pass it up the line to the chief.
Q: With Squamish growing so much, is one of the biggest challenges for the department keeping up with equipment and infrastructure?
A: Yeah, it is a huge challenge. The No. 2 Fire Hall (Tantalus Road Garibaldi Highlands), which is our main fire hall, and it houses our administrative facility and our response equipment, is old and needs to be upgraded seismically and access-wise so it is accessible for the public who have disabilities — or it needs to be replaced. But we have known that for some time and it is not cheap, so that is a challenge. It is something that has to happen and I know we are going to be addressing it in the next budget cycle.
Just the growth [in Squamish] and the number of people, the volume of people through here in the backcountry, on the highways, the increased population and where population is going, those are all considerations for us and we definitely have to keep up and improve.
Q: What other goals do you have for the role of fire chief?
A: Planning for future fire halls perhaps in the north if population keeps growing there in that end of town.
We do a pretty good job of recruiting, there are a lot of people who want to be volunteer firefighters and that is fantastic, but we struggle sometimes with retention. We may lose them to career departments in the city, they may find out as a volunteer that the time commitment is too much with their other family or work commitments, so we go through quite a few firefighters.
Keeping up with the training is also huge.
There is a new council and we will be looking at our budget numbers with them soon.
Q: What else would you like people of Squamish to know about Squamish Fire Rescue.
A: That we have got a really dedicated staff, not just career, but volunteers and they are all in it 100 per cent, they are well trained, they are serving their community and they are doing it because it is what they want to do.
If you need the fire department and it is the middle of the night or whenever, a lot of those people are volunteers, and they are out doing it because they love to do it.
