CORNWALL, Ontario – Last week’s massive blaze at the Ontario Hockey Academy is raising alarm bells with the city’s fire department and its ability to call in off-duty personnel.
Both the fire service, and its union, concede there are significant problems with a system that must resort to a person, typically a dispatcher, sitting down to manually call in off-duty people.
The problem lies in the fact that at the time of a major incident, like last week’s fire, dispatchers are already swamped with work, including monitoring the scene and answering a flood of 911 calls.
During last week’s fire at OHA the city had to resort to requesting firefighters from South Stormont – while it was at the same time trying to call in a number of its own people who either declined to come in, or didn’t get the call.
“The problem here is we’re doing it in the stone ages,” said Jason Crites, president of the Cornwall Professional Firefighters Association. “To call us back they have manually sit there and call us. The worse the scenario, the worse it works.
“It sounds like they missed the better part of one shift.”
No one is ready to make the leap yet and suggest that the South Stormont firefighters wouldn’t have been necessary had enough Cornwall firefighters been called in.
But the questions are being asked.
“It’s hard to tell, because how many guys would they have got. They would have had more of our guys in,” added Crites. “This has got more to do with the call-back system that everyone knows has been broken for 10 years.
“It’s not so much activating mutual aid as it is exhausting our own resources first.”
Fire chief Pierre Voisine was not available for comment, but deputy chief Bruce Donig concedes there are problems with the system.
“We definitely have some challenges in relation to that call and getting ahold of our off-duty guys,” he said, adding the fire service is working the problem to find efficiencies. “Dispatch was obviously very busy and dealing with us and the police in dealing with the size of that incident and the scene.
“We made the determination for the wellness of our firefighters who had been on the scene for two hours…that’s why we went ahead and called in Long Sault to come and help us.”
It’s unknown how much that call will cost the city. Donig said calculations are still being finalized when it comes to South Stormont firefighter hours and the like. About a dozen from South Stormont helped fight the city fire.
Donig declined to say how many off-duty city firefighters were being sought to fight the fire, but Crites suggested more than a dozen ultimately made the trip in to help.
Crites also said the union is in the midst of readying grievances that the city will have to answer.
The union would like to see a high-tech solution to the problem that includes automated calls seeking help from off-duty fierfighters.
