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Reconsider fire protection decision

As a recently retired and fairly long serving volunteer at Squamish Fire Rescue, I feel obliged to make a comment or two on the recent announcement that a career firefighter is to be laid off by the District of Squamish ["Firefighter cut creates fear

As a recently retired and fairly long serving volunteer at Squamish Fire Rescue, I feel obliged to make a comment or two on the recent announcement that a career firefighter is to be laid off by the District of Squamish ["Firefighter cut creates fear for safety," The Chief, May 15].

You, the residents of Squamish probably do not think about emergency services in general or the fire department in particular very often except when you hear a siren, see a fire truck or heaven forbid, you need them in a hurry, then you are really pleased to have them arrive where you need them usually in timely fashion.

Most of you do not realize the hard work and ongoing training that it takes just to be capable of being a member of the crew on the truck that arrives at your incident at 2:30 in the morning.

The majority of this training is provided and supported by the career firefighters in Squamish, this training level will be more difficult to maintain with the extra workload caused by being a man short. During the regular work week the career firefighters respond to all routine and emergency incidents that can be dealt with by a single truck and crew and the volunteers are not called.

You must at this point remember that when volunteers are called out during the regular work week many of them lose wages for the time that they are away from work, gone are the days of the great corporate citizens who allowed their employees time off to deal with emergencies.

BC Rail, BC Tel, Overwaitea and Carneys and stood the cost of their absence, strangely enough the only major employer that did not let it's hourly workers go was the District of Squamish.

Volunteers are still called out to major incidents during the regular work week and all are happy to be involved and be of assistance but here is the problem with the proposed laying off of a career firefighter.

Due to the fact that one career firefighter is off on an extended sick leave and due to the fact that the district has decided not to hire a summer relief firefighter, the career firefighters can no longer provide the minimum manpower required on a truck and so cannot respond to your emergencies during the regular work week unless one of the senior officers of the department is in the firehall when the alarm comes in.

This then leads me to surmise that the DOS expects the volunteers to be paged to assist in incidents that they would usually not have been called to and now volunteers are seemingly expected to lose income to help make up the districts perceived economic shortfall when at the same time the district has apparently budgeted a huge amount of money for trail development.

Given that the DOS spends about half the amount on the fire service that other communities spend, and given that training of new and existing personnel is ongoing and crucial, the DOS should reconsider this illogical move.

R. Garrett

Squamish

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