The volunteers of the Burns Lake Fire Department are set to receive a major upgrade in their training over the next couple of years.
A new training ground and centre will be set up thanks to the Burns Lake Fire Training Society, which received its society status in April of this year.
The Burns Lake Fire Training Society, which consists of current members of the Burns Lake Fire Department, including its president, Brian Brinkhurst and its treasurer, Rob Krause, first applied to Burns Lake Community Forest (Comfor) for a land donation in lieu of a cash donation in April 2010, and received approval from Comfor to use the land, which is up Lake Babine Road, for its fire training centre.
This April, when it received its society status, the training society also entered into a 25-year lease with Comfor for the land up Lake Babine Road.
Three weeks ago, the Burns Lake Fire Department hosted its first accredited training exercise on the land, when it did auto extrication technique training on the land, June 13-15.
The Burns Lake Fire Training Society’s plan for the land is to develop and build a training site for its department’s volunteer firefighters, as well as have the ability to offer accredited fire training exercises, through the B.C. Justice Institute, for its volunteers, and volunteer firefighters from departments throughout Northwest B.C.
At the auto extrication technique training, six different departments had firefighters there training that weekend.
“My wish list of stuff I’d like to get done up there is dynamic it changes on a daily basis,” Brinkhurst said.
As of now, the fire training society’s plan is to develop the training centre, so it could provide training excises for a number of training techniques.
The site would include a Self Contained Breathing Apparatus (SCBA) confidence training building, a live burn building, an auto extrication technique training site, an over embankment rescue training site and a propane and LNG training site.
The plan for an incidence command centre training site has been put on hold at the moment.
The site will allow firefighters to train on different techniques, but it would officially accredit them with have learned these techniques unless the department brought in instructors from the Justice Institute.
To that end Brinkhurst would like to focus on the auto extrication technique training, the reason being that Fort St. James and Smithers already offer an accredited live burn training course and Brinkhurst would rather not compete with those two communities on that issue.
“We want to do more auto extrication because that’s what the majority of our calls are for and there really isn’t a good place here locally in the Northwest that does specific auto extrication training,” Brinkhurst said.
Another area that Brinkhurst would like to focus his accredited training on is over embankment rescue training techniques.
This training would allow the firefighters to learn how to load an injured person, that has gone over a steep embankment, on to a stretcher, and how to use their systems of ropes to bring them bank up over the embankment.
“We had to do one recently out at Trout Lake, where the injured person went over an about 40 foot embankment, and we had to bring them up on a stretcher using our winch system,” Brinkhurst said.
At the Village of Burns Lake council meeting last Tuesday, the society gave a presentation to village council, and one of the pressing questions from council focused around the issue of money.
Brinkhurst assured village council the society is not looking for anything monetary related from the village council.
The society has been looking at grants from the Regional District of Bulkley-Nechako in order to receive money to fund the training centre.
Rob Krause, Deputy Fire Chief for the Burns Lake Fire Department, and treasurer of the society added that while the society wouldn’t be looking for money for the fire department’s budget from the village in 2015, they would still be looking for the village’s help.
“We’re not looking for cash from the village we’re not looking for a budget line in the fire departments budget for any of this we are looking for in the future is in kind work,” Krause said, “being able to use some of the village works crew to move dirt or move equipment around things we can capture as our in kind contributions towards grants.”
Krause added that this training centre could offer economic impact to the Burns Lake community, too.
When the department held its auto extrication technique training in June, five firefighters from outside communities stayed in Burns Lake for the weekend.
Those stays added up to 10 nights of hotel room stays, and two and a half days worth of meals for those five firefighters.
As well, other firefighters from neighbouring communities making the trip to Burns Lake also bought gas in the community, so the potential for economic impact is there.
While the training centre falls outside the village’s fire protection zone, it is still in the regional district’s fire protection area, which gives added benefits to the fire department.
“It gives us the ability to go up there and train, and if get a fire or get a call, we can still respond because we are still close enough to do that,” Brinkhurst said.
The fire training society has yet to determine a time line for when this centre would be fully equipped and running.