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Geography and manpower significantly curb firefighting proficiency in rural areas of Halifax Regional Municipality.

Ken Stuebing, chief of Halifax Regional Fire and Emergency, said the risk is particularly acute in the Eastern Shore area stretching southwesterly from Moser River toward Musquodoboit Harbour.

“The reality is that we have a dire situation on the Eastern Shore, one that literally keeps me up at night,” Stuebing told regional councillors during his budget presentation Tuesday.

“The challenges that we have in the Eastern Shore area in particular are compounded by the fact that we have an aging community, we have a shrinking population and we have an aging volunteer firefighting force,” Stuebing said.

“Despite all our valiant efforts to recruit volunteers, we’ve not been able to do it.”

Sheet Harbour and Musquodoboit Harbour have composite fire stations staffed by a combination of career and volunteer firefighters. A string of seven fire stations staffed solely by volunteers dot the 110-kilometre distance from Moser River at the far eastern tip of the municipality to Musquodoboit Harbour.

Only one person from the whole Eastern Shore area has signed on for the fire department’s next training class for volunteers, Stuebing said, offset by an area volunteer who is taking a leave.

Stuebing said call volume comes into play in service delivery.

“Call volume can put a volunteer firefighter in a position, and it’s happened to me in the past, where their employer comes to them and says you need to figure out if you want to be a firefighter or if you want to work for me. You can’t leave your work every day to go to a call.

At some point, it just makes more sense to have (career) staff there to respond to that call.”

The chief said that the Sheet Harbour station has career firefighters on the job between the weekday hours of 7:30 a.m., and 5:30 p.m.

“When they go home at night, the people who will be responding to that call are volunteers,” of whom there are three, Stuebing said. The number of volunteer firefighters who could respond to calls from area stations at East Ship Harbour, Tangier, Mushaboom and Three Harbours along Highway 7 range from seven to none. Volunteers often have to drive past another station before getting to their call.

Stuebing said there are a disproportionate number of medical calls coming into rural fire stations.

“The first-in unit is the most important for medical calls because (those calls) are not getting the rest of the units. For firefighting, we need the rest of the firefighters. Without the rest of the firefighters, firefighting becomes a spectator sport. We sit back and we watch the fire burn and we try to protect the houses on each side of the (burning) house.

“There won’t be a rescue, we won’t be able to put the fire out.”

Stuebing’s presentation proposed an operating budget expenditure of $73.7 million for the 2020-21 fiscal year to cover 460 career firefighters and 509 volunteers working in 51 fire stations, including 22 volunteer stations, 21 composite stations and eight 24-hour career stations.

The presentation said the department had first units on the scene of urban fires within eight minutes 81.59 per cent of the time in 2019, up more than nine per cent from the year before.

Backup units were on the scene within 11 minutes 68.59 per cent of the time for urban fires and the department responded within 7.5 minutes to urban medical calls 79.39 per cent of the time. The target was to meet those response times 90 per cent of the time.

On rural calls, daytime career firefighters had a first unit at the scene within 13 minutes 70 per cent of the time and volunteer units were first on the scene within 17.5 minutes 73.85 per cent of the time. Career staff responded to daytime rural medical calls within 12.4 minutes 83.84 per cent of the time and volunteers were on the scene of rural medical calls within 17.5 minutes 87.44 per cent of the time.

All of the response times were below municipal targets.

The fire chief said rural response times depend on the road networks, the distance the volunteer has to travel and the volunteer’s availability.

“The rough rule of thumb is you count on 50 per cent of your volunteers to respond,” Stuebing said.

In areas like Eastern Shore, he said it “is not just a public safety issue but a firefighter safety issue.”

“We want two firefighters in the danger zone and two to help them out if things go bad,” he said.

Stuebing admitted he did not have an answer for the Eastern Shore risks to share with council.

“But I felt I had an obligation to share that information with you. It is top of mind for us and we continue to work that problem within our current resources.”

Coun. Tim Outhit (Bedford-Wentworth) suggested some sort of an auxiliary firefighting force of staffers who were paid an intermediate wage of $30,000 or $40,000 to be at the ready in rural areas.

Coun. Waye Mason (Halifax Downtown) said a big concern in the rural areas is if the municipal standards for response times are reasonable.

“If we’re meeting the standards in the bylaw, I think that you are still going to see high risk because the population is so low and the stations are so far apart,” Mason said. “Trying to understand what that really means is going to take a longer presentation.”