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Comment: Website a story hub for firefighters

Shortly before sitting down to write this editorial on a Monday in late February I posted several news stories on the front page of our Firefightingincanada.com website, all involving significant structural fires in the previous few days.

The largest was a massive blaze in Toronto that gutted most of a city block of heritage buildings. Another story was about seniors in Winnipeg being evacuated from a low-rise complex after workers using a torch started a fire. There was a also a report of a house fire in Winnipeg, in which a firefighter and an occupant of the home were injured. Other stories included a house fire in Toronto that killed a father and two children, a blaze in Calgary that damaged several buildings, a fatal fire in Mississauga, Ont., that homicide investigators were looking into, another Win­nipeg fire in that razed stores and apartments, and the rescue of a woman from a burning building in St. John’s.

Winter weekends seem to be particularly busy for firefighters with innumerable fires and car accidents.

What appears consistent is the immediate and capable response of the fire service to hundreds of calls in hundreds of communities every day.

Our website, which highlights fire-service news, features several web-exclusive columns and our front page is a testament to the training, discipline and commitment of Canada’s firefighters.

We’d love to post your stories (even a few sentences or a couple of paragraphs) and photos from your department’s experiences on our site. Send them in and we’ll get them online.

Going forward, we hope to add pages to our site, including our popular magazine features Brigade News and incident reports.

Stay tuned.

•  •  •

We promised an update on the two-hatter issue in Orangeville, Ont. At last word, Orangeville Fire Department officials were interviewing candidates for 12 positions to replace volunteers who were forced out late last year over the two-hatter issue.

The department is hiring seven or eight people to replace the seven volunteer firefighters who left their positions in October after their union warned that they could lose their full-time jobs with other departments.

Orangeville had filed a grievance against the union and the issue was on hold awaiting the appointment of an arbitrator.

A similar debate is happening in nearby Innisfil, Ont., with a grievance scheduled to be heard in the summer.

•  •  •

It was interesting putting together this month’s cover story on tips for industrial firefighting. Surprisingly, we had some trouble finding people to interview, partially due to time constraints and our deadlines, but also because, as Sean Tracey reports in his NFPA Impact column industrial brigades often operate under the radar.

Coincidentally, we received a great incident report for this month’s issue from Deputy Chief Steve Sorensen in Sooke, B.C., about a propane leak and his department’s quick and thorough response to it – a perfect lesson in how training municipal firefighters for industrial accidents pays off.