The vice president of the Halifax Fire union says they are frustrated over the response to the Susies Lake wildfire in Bayers Lake, claiming nothing was learned from the wildfires two years ago.
Joe Triff with the Halifax Professional Fire Fighters tells our newsroom when the 30-hectare fire broke out, the Department of Natural Resources did not call in any of their extra members for help on day one.
“In the subsequent days, they did bring in some extra staff, but we had the large majority of our firefighting resources for Halifax tied up at that incident for the bulk of the day and we didn’t bring a single extra crew in to help with the other goings on in the city,” says Triff.
He adds, there were a number of recommendations made after the Tantallon wildfire in 2023 that damaged or destroyed more than 150 homes.
This includes policies, recalls, and a plan for major incidents but according to Triff, nothing has materialized.
“It’s one thing to say, ‘Okay, we’ve learned some lessons from this and we’re going to do better next time’, and then the next time comes around and nothing’s changed.”
What should they do next time?
When DNR is in charge of a scene, they request resources needed, and Halifax Fire decides who they will send.
Triff says they have advocated for policies that would require an emergency callback of enough firefighters to staff one or two fire trucks – these are called third alarms.
“As the level of the incident increases and more resources are dedicated to it, we would have the ability to call back staff to help with the other ongoing issues,” says Triff. “We saw this in Tantallon and when the Waegwoltic Club caught fire. We didn’t have anything in place to handle those two large incidents at the same time.”
He says instead of hitting the panic button and recalling everyone available, have something in place to mitigate the incident early on.
Training
The International Association of Firefighters partnered with Ottawa for training on recognizing wildfire risk.
But according to Triff, there has been no movement on that.
“We sent six people from Halifax Fire to New Brunswick to train the trainers on this course, and we have had to uptake from Halifax Fire to implement this train,” says Triff. “We have not seen new personal protective equipment. We have not seen new policies, and we’ve had no hands-on training regarding wildfire in the two years since.”
“We have to stop planning to create a plan and we have to start actioning the items that are impacting the frontline firefighters.”
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