FORT ST. JOHN -- The City of Fort St. John is adopting a new wildfire deployment policy to better allocate local firefighting resources.
The policy will see the creation of a new risk management decision-making process to ensure the Fort St. John Fire Department is not overextended by remote deployments during the upcoming wildfire season.
“Prior to the wildfire season the British Columbia Wildfire Service develops a database of fire departments throughout the province that are potentially available for deployment,” reads the report submitted by Fire Chief Robert Norton.
The requests from the BC Wildfire Service will now be assessed by the duty and fire chief, who will give final approval on whether crews are deployed.
The fire department will consider a number of factors to determine if they can support a deployment request including location, staffing numbers, cost, apparatus availability, and weather.
Deployment outside of an eight hour travel time will be assessed on a case-by-case basis under extreme circumstances, such as a Provincial State of Emergency, and would require approval from city council.
Command staff will be made available for deployment to any location, subject to local conditions and availability.
The Fire Chief said during an April 8th report to council that the majority of provincial deployments last less than a week, but there have been situations dating back to 2017 where crews were deployed for up to 33 days.
“Given the amount of operational and financial considerations that must be undertaken prior to committing fire department resources to a provincial wildfire deployment, there is benefit in capturing the required process within a Council policy,” said Norton.
