ATHABASCA: If April showers bring May flowers, the lack thereof seems to only bring wildfires, as evidenced by the Town of Athabasca’s Fire Services second-quarter report.
During the July 11 council meeting, department interim fire chief Jason Sturrock presented the quarterly report, stepping in after previous captain Travis Shalapay was promoted to oversee the fire services department for Athabasca County. Sturrock said firefighters attended 15 wildland fires — 13 in the county and two in other jurisdictions — as well as 16 medical assist calls split between the town, county, and other jurisdictions.
“It was a busy quarter for us, we handled 71 calls, year to date we are at 92, in the entirety of 2022 we only had 121 calls for the entire year,” said Sturrock. “It was a really busy quarter for us. Right now we have 15 active members, two reserve members, and four recruits that are now responding to calls with supervision, and we have another drive in process with six recruits in that class.”
Besides the wildfire calls, councillors were also concerned about the increase in medical response calls; while the volunteers are all trained in at least some first aid, there can be a large variation depending on who responds.
“We had 10 medical calls in town, and another three in the county, and some were pretty serious. We had two that were juveniles under four years of age, one fatality and one serious burn,” said the interim chief. “We get there before the ambulance about 35 per cent of the time. The level of care depends on who’s available, we have members that range from standard first aid to first medical responders to primary care paramedics to our advanced care paramedic.”
In a July 25 follow up interview, Sturrock said that the heavy call load has had a toll on the volunteers.
“It’s definitely more taxing, it’s more taxing on our families and our employers, since we’re all just volunteers with full-time jobs. We wouldn’t have been able to do it without the support of our employers and families for sure,” he said.
Looking forward, conditions have improved and Sturrock hopes to see numbers more in line with the 21 calls they had in the first three months of 2023.
“Things are definitely looking up with the amount of rain we’ve had recently,” said Sturrock. “Going forwards, there’s no real anomalies or anything that sticks out really. I’m hoping we will be able to get back to those numbers we saw in Q1.”
