According to the Huntsville/Lake of Bays Fire Department, it responds to an estimated 70 hydro-related calls annually, and about 22 per cent of those calls take more than an hour.
Fire Chief Gary Monahan was before Lake of Bays Council on August 13, asking the municipality to amend its user fee bylaw to allow staff to invoice the appropriate electrical utility company for all responses exceeding an hour where the fire department is often on standby waiting for the utility company to arrive.
According to a report submitted by Monahan to the council, between 2019 and 2023, the fire department responded to 349 incidents involving hydro wires, resulting in approximately 1,086 volunteer firefighter hours. He said that had the municipality implemented a charge for all calls lasting more than 60 minutes during those five years; the cost recovery could’ve amounted to about $31,813.80.
“Staff recognize and appreciate that during significant weather events utility companies are extremely busy and require assistance from the fire department, however, fire department apparatus and crews can be committed to hydro wire responses for an extended period of time which would make them unavailable to respond to other incidents,” noted Monahan.
Council agreed to move forward with requiring utility companies to pay for fire calls that last longer than an hour. Depending on the requirement, the full MTO rate will be charged for a pumper on standby, and half the MTO rate will be charged for an administration vehicle on standby.
The MTO rate in 2023 was $543.02 per hour.
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The Real Person!
The Real Person!
I remember as a volunteer fireman in the 70’s and 80’s where we would be called out to a hydro line incident.
We would respond with a truck and a full crew of firefighters.
Often, due to wet weather, there was no danger of a fire spreading.
We had radio’s with which to call for support if needed back then. Now anyone could call for support on any cell phone.
We could not do anything much until Hydro showed up and de-energized the damaged line so all we could really do was wait and guard the site to keep crazy people away from it. This could often be done by two firefighters with maybe some directional flagging equipment who could be deployed in their personal pick up truck.
The rest of the firefighters and truck could go back to the hall and be called in the unlikely event that they were needed again, or maybe for 15 minutes to soak down the ground after Hydro had done their repair.
They did not in any way need to have the truck and whole crew stay on site for most of the incident time.
With this in mind I think the “cost for a response” might be over stated.
Also, do we enjoy having electricity delivered to our homes and businesses? In the long run, charging the utility company will merely get the cost passed on to us through our utility bills. It will be no different than getting the bill from the fire department passed on through our municipal tax bills. At the end of the day we will actually be a bit poorer as both the municipality and Hydro utility will need to pay some staff to do all the accounting and passing of money back and forth.
I kind of think this is just a waste of time unless the problem gets really very large and serious and at about $6200 dollars a year to cover the firefighter’s costs for the entire Huntsville, Lake of Bays area it does not look like this is a problem of significance.
I don’t know how they pay firefighters now but when I was there a set amount was budgeted for “pay” for the “volunteers” and at the end of the year this amount was distributed to the firefighters based on their hours of service in the year. The more they worked the less they were paid per hour. (remember we signed up as volunteers, not paid fire fighters like in the city.) For this reason a few extra utility calls did not change the municipalities cost at all.
Maybe they do it differently nowadays.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
This is an interesting and perhaps universal conundrum. Here in Nova Scotia, unlike Ontario, the electrical power utility is a for-(LARGE)profit corporation, so not a provincially owned utility. The fire service here (strictly volunteer other than a few paid in the two cities and a few larger towns) faced this same point and were advised by a retired utility employee that we probably should not even be involved with downed power lines given that we had no idea of the electrical potential of the involved wires. So instead of looking for compensation for extended responses we are currently working with the utility to develop a more appropriate plan; too early to know exactly what that will look like but probably some readily available training for responders and possibly a contribution to a larger training fund pool that all firefighters are able to access. Time will tell how successful this initiative will be.