The Osoyoos Fire Department currently has close to 25 active members, but deputy fire chief Bill Roque would like to see between 35 and 40. However, the department is having a difficult time finding members willing to commit to the extensive time requirements, which include weekly practices and many late night calls. (Vanessa Broadbent photo)
By Michele Weisz
Osoyoos Times
The Osoyoos Fire Department has approximately 25 active members, but several are thinking about retirement and will slowly need to be replaced.
“Osoyoos is not a young community,” said Deputy Fire Chief Bill Roque. “It makes it more difficult (to recruit members).”
Roque compared the age of Osoyoos’ population to Oliver’s, which he finds has “a lot more resources to draw from.”
Over 80 per cent of all firefighters in Canada, including those in Osoyoos, are volunteers. A 2016 National Fire Prevention Association report estimated that of the total number of firefighters in Canada, 126,650 (83 per cent) were volunteer firefighters.
For many communities across the country recruiting volunteer firefighters has become an increasingly difficult task and Osoyoos is no exception.
Chief Ryan McCaskill said that finding volunteers in an age where most households include two working parents is very challenging. Without a stay-at-home parent, many volunteers are simply unable to respond to emergency calls.
“Husband works, wife works – it’s very hard. They have to find babysitters … they have to look after their family,” he said.
Then there are firefighters who would like to be able to answer calls but day jobs often prevent them from doing so.
McCaskill said that things have changed in Osoyoos since he became a firefighter almost 20 years ago.
“In the past, the town was a lot smaller,” he said. “The firefighters would go to work, their bosses knew what they did and would let them leave … it was a different time back then.”
• Read more: Home on 92 Ave goes up in flames
Firefighters in Osoyoos get paid for every call they respond to and the weekly practices they must participate in. They carry a pager that notifies them of emergencies after which they report to the fire hall.
After completing a shift, regardless of how many hours they have been on duty, they get up in the morning and go to their day jobs.
“We’re getting up in the middle of the night for like 14 hours sometimes,” McCaskill said. “There’s so much work to do and then we got to get up the next day and go to work. We just can’t stop doing that too.”
To serve as a firefighter in Osoyoos, one must complete 275 hours of training and attend practice every Wednesday evening from 7 to 9 p.m.
This pulls many firefighters away from their families, McCaskill said.
“If you’re missing Christmas because we have a fire, if you’re missing anniversaries or whatever, it puts a stress load (on members),” he said. “For what we get paid, some people (think it’s) just not worth it.”
Because there are no full-time firefighters in the department, McCaskill can never be certain of how many firefighters will respond to an emergency and the department can at times be short staffed.
Sometimes eight or 12 team members show up, but occasionally there’s less, McCaskill said.
“Four guys show up and they’re waiting for the man power to actually do a proper attack … you want to be able to put the fire out but you can’t send anybody close to the vehicle without a backup line.”
Osoyoos Fire Chief Ryan McCaskill (Richard McGuire photo)
Several firefighters in the department have been active for more than 30 years and although it’s nice to have “good, strong, young” recruits, McCaskill said they lack the knowledge and wisdom that come from hands-on experience.
“If it gets to the point where the veterans leave, we’ll still be able to do the job but it’s just more worrisome,” he said. “The veteran guys are able to pick out the safety points right away – anything that’s dangerous to us, they’ll find it (but) the younger guys, they do their job well but they might miss something because their adrenalin’s going and they’re focussed right on that and they might miss something.”
Roque said it would be nice to have 35 to 40 firefighters so that the department is less likely to be short-staffed in the event of an emergency. He said it is with that in mind that the fire hall was designed with 36 stalls.
McCaskill would like to dispel the idea that firefighters must all be young and conform to a certain physical standard. There is no age requirement to volunteer as a firefighter and anyone is welcome to apply.
“Everybody has a strength and weakness; we have jobs for everybody,” he said. “I think people think you have to be able to do all of these physical activities when you don’t. There’s jobs for everybody, we just need to teach you them.”
Despite changing recruitment numbers, the sense of comradery among firefighters and their desire to contribute to their community, even if it means putting themselves in harm’s way, has not changed.
“You have to be committed,” McCaskill said. “People’s lives are at stake.”
While the Osoyoos Fire Department has actively stepped up its recruitment campaign in recent weeks, Roque described it as an “ongoing drive” that never ends. The important thing, he said, is that they are “getting the job done, and always have.”
