ASK Salt Spring: Answered - Ep. 36 Rollie Cook

Episode Date: April 27, 2024

Ask Salt Spring Answered talks to Rollie Cook, chair of the Salt Spring Fire Protection District about the new firehall. equipment needs, fire protection and much more.

You're listening to episode 36 of Ask Salt Spring Answered and this week we talk to Rolly Cook who is the board chair of the Salt Spring Fire Protection District. So we're here after our Salt Spring and I'm here with Rolly Cook who is the board chair of the Salt Spring Fire Protection District. Hi Rolly, thanks for coming in. We had a pretty wide-ranging discussion today, a lot of issues and I think, well first off we talked about the new fire hall, and I think you said how excited you were about the fact that they're actually moving earth on the site now. And, yeah, tell us a bit about that and what's happening with the development there. We had a referendum vote about 18 months ago, summer a year and a half ago, and we had 75% voter approval. We took that and then we hired an architect, we hired a

construction manager, we've been doing all the planning and homework to do a good job. It is a big expenditure, It's about $12 million at the end of the day. So we want to do this project really, really well. We've gone through and picked up all of our building permits now, going through the CRD, Islands Trust, that's all done. And people will have noticed trucks starting to move the soil so what we're doing now is preparing the site for the utilities and the foundation so we'll be going working to pour a concrete foundation that'll be done this spring, summer. And the unique thing about this building is it's designed to withstand a 9.0 earthquake. And to give you an idea of what that means,

a 9.0 earthquake probably means the soil will be going up and down 20 feet, up and down and side to side for a period of time of about two minutes. So this building will be able to withstand that and still deliver a functioning fire protection service at the end of the day. Pretty exciting. Yeah. Now, one thing we talked about was water storage as well, and I think I was talking to you about the drainage, and you said that there's

going to be some a retention pond that's going to be filled for to use for training purposes and that you would also have 60,000 gallons of new water available to fight fires in the downtown area. That's right. So that's pretty good news because I think you said that the Windsor fire was quite challenging wasn't it? It was very challenging. The department needs to throw about 2,000 gallons of water on a big fire like that per minute for several hours. So you do the math and it's hundreds of thousands of gallons of water that we need to control a fire. With the Windsor fire, towards the end we were actually sucking the North Silspring water system dry. It was pretty rough. So what we're going to be doing is putting 60,000 gallons of water in storage and we also have a tender system so we can shuttle water very quickly and pump it onto the site. So that effectively

adds about another thousand gallons a minute to the downtown water supply that North Sulphurine Water provides of about a thousand gallons a minute. So with this we can add another hour or two of firefighting capacity. Exciting. So hopefully, I mean obviously Windsor was a pretty extreme example but most fires you could probably deal with fairly successfully right? We hope.

But you know, in the worst case scenario you think about mullets in that complex. Or if you had country grocer, something happened there. Or if you had Country Grocer, something happened there. Or Gasoline Alley, something could happen there.

Or the high school. These are all major building envelopes that present a challenge. Right, yeah. Now I think the question was asked about saltwater pumps and am I right? You're going to test one? Right, yeah. Now, I think the question was asked about saltwater pumps, and am I right, you're going to test one? There's one that you're going to bring in? Our fire chief, Jamie Holmes, has already gone to Vancouver to see a functioning saltwater pumping system

that's available in the city of Vancouver. He's contacted the supplier of that. It's a Dutch company, and they're very good at pumping salt water in Holland. So he has been working with them. They're going to do a demonstration here on the island. I think in the next six months, a pump will be coming to the island for demonstration purposes. So we're looking at it. It's about a quarter of a million dollars.

And so we're trying to balance the demands on our budget. But the good news is we've been putting $50,000 away for just this issue for the last five years. So we have a quarter of a million dollars in reserves. So hopefully we can strike a good deal. So we'll be able to access seawater to fight fires in the event that we didn't have enough regular water. Yeah, okay. I think you also talked about that there could be a problem

with some developments if they're three stories high because your trucks won't go go they go to 25 feet and you would like ideally to go to 30 to 40 feet yes the province has just basically mandated that it will be built and it'll be a three-story building and most of the buildings people will notice on the island are two-story buildings. We haven't had many three-story buildings. Mullitz downtown is a three-story building. I think Croftonburg also has a three-story, two three-story buildings. So we have a problem. If you try to rescue somebody from the third floor and your ladder only goes 20 feet and it's 25 feet up to the third floor, you have a problem.

The other issue is in a major fire, you want to throw water onto the building from above. So you need to get above the roof line. Well, if the roof line on a three-story building is 30 feet and your hose will only go 20 feet up you have a problem so we're looking at getting a an apparatus that will protect the community and it affects insurance rates if we don't do this the insurance rating for the whole island, not just the buildings at risk, but the whole island is downgraded in an accreditation process. Right. I think before you arrived today, actually, we were talking to Rodney, and he was talking

about a boom truck as a possibility, which is a smaller truck than a big ladder truck, and it's more maneuverable and more suitable for the roads here on Salt Spring and that kind of thing. That's right. Yeah. There's a Nova Scotia company, and they're putting together a three-ton truck with a boom. It's sort of like a BC Hydro truck, but it would come with a pump so we could pump water and it would come with the

hydraulics to lift the ladder up and it would allow us to reach 50 feet oh and it's also small enough that it can go down a lot of rural bumpy roads so it's it's really just a big bc hydro truck and it's just being uh prototyped now by a nova scotia company so we're in line to follow that up so we don't know how much they cost yet under a million dollars yeah and a full-scale urban ladder truck is over two million right okay now i was surprised you were talking about the fire hall at fulford and the fact it's made of cinder blocks with no rebar and no cement in yeah and that if there was a major earthquake basically it would fall down and you'd lose quite a bit of your equipment we'd lose one third of our equipment so each fire hole the the one at Central, the one downtown, and the one at Fulford,

have a full engine and a water tender and usually some support vehicles. We would lose one-third of our equipment at Fulford. And it wouldn't have to be a 9.0 or a quick knock it down. Maybe a four would do it. So we've got a problem. I think the folks, you know, in 1959, 1960 when they were starting up the fire district and they were building these new buildings, they had no idea that we were on a seismic, an active seismic area. Geologists tell us the last major earthquake that we had in this region was in the late 1700s.

And it seems to be on a 250, 300-year cycle. They can go back in the geological record and see evidence that about every 300 years something big happens. Well, we're almost at that point right now. The clock is ticking. Right. So what's the solution to that then? There was some discussion of replacing it with a metal building, perhaps further forward, and that's obviously an expense.

Firefighters and Gaming Homes is looking at a couple of possibilities. One is to rebuild the building and to start over. That is many millions of dollars. Another option is to leave the old building in place and use it as sort of a storage area, maybe a meeting room area, and build something in front of it. We could build a metal building and do the seismic standard, probably for half the money of repairing and replacing the existing one. Right. Is that part of your five-year plan? You talked about a five-year plan that you have.

Yes. We worked with our volunteer fire department team and our career staff and our executive team and the fire chief and CAO, we put together a five-year plan earlier this year. It's on our website now. And we're looking at going forward after we finish the main fire hall, what are the issues that we have to address? How much are those going to cost? What is the sequence that we should be putting those in.

They're all up in the air right now. We have to finish the main hall first. Right. But then we are going to try to protect the community going forward. And the other thing that we have to balance is the budget. We recognize that we can't just charge ahead and spend lots of money. So we're going to do it in an orderly step-by-step process. Right.

Okay, and I think we were talking about, or there was a question actually, about the Central Hall, the one by the Fritz Theater there, that once you move into the new building, that one is so close to it that really you might want to move further north so you could have better coverage on the north end, right? Right. So we have that issue and we've identified a couple of spots up in the Channel Ridge area that would work well for us.

The kicker though is the other problem. If we move our fire department north to Brinkworthy, the main hall, we're creating a service gap in the central part of the island. So if you think of the old SLEG building, roughly that area becomes semi-protected as opposed to fully protected. And so we've got a gap in the middle, a gap in the north, and we have a problem with our Fulford site.

This is all because we've had years of underinvestment. We had sort of an attitude on the island that it's good enough. And the island has gone from 2,000 people when we were building hulls in the 1950s and 60s to now we're at 12,000, and we're faced with different challenges. We have three- and four-story buildings coming our way, and we have to recognize that we have to manage those risks. Now, the new hall will be completed, I gather, by fall of next year?

Yes. Right. So we've got, basically, our contractor MKM Construction tells us that by late fall next year they'll be giving us the keys. Right, and this is a $12 million building, right? It is. And you're borrowing $9.7 million. We are.

So that will be amortized over a long period, presumably. 20 years, probably. And will only cost the taxpayer, you know... $650,000 a year. Right, okay. Now, I really have to say thank you to the community. We had a 75 percent approval vote for this new project and it's really an expression of good faith by the community in the future. So I think the community deserves a lot of credit and respect

for making that investment. Yeah and of course the the question arose, I think, from one of the people as to what will happen with the old fire hall once you move out. And of course, as you said, it's not really your decision, right? No, we turned the old fire hall over to the CRD, but we did it in a really interesting way. We commissioned a special committee, a team, that included people from the CRD Islands Trust, the Ag Alliance, which is all the farm groups, the Chamber of Commerce,

and Country Grocer. And that team met and they agreed that the best use of the downtown fire site would be a year-round food market, an indoor food market, so that local farmers could grow food and have a place to market it. Right. And that, I gather, would result in getting some grant money and stuff like that too. The office of BC has indicated that there's some money available for supporting local ag initiatives. And then I think we have to challenge our friends at the CRD to have a public process to ask the community to get involved. We've done it before. We've built the abattoir. The abattoir has cost us almost a million dollars of public investment. We fundraised as an ag community.

That's a success story. The new facility that the Ag Alliance has also got on Bettis Road is another huge success story. We're doing good things. We can do it. Yeah. Now, we did delve into sort of, I guess, one of the bad news type things when we were talking about the St. Mary Lake watershed. And I think you were speculating that because of all the dead wood that's up there and that kind of thing, that if there was a major fire, that could cause some huge problems for our water supply from St. Mary Lake. It's a potential disaster. Yeah. Without trying to put a, I'll put an exclamation point behind that. I was walking that forest last summer with a UBC forestry professor and he was

looking at the forest. It's all, it's a uniform stand. It's all the same age, all the same species. It's a dug fir. There is almost no deciduous material in there. There's no alder. There's no aspen. There are no maples to any serious degree. And the deciduous forest slows down a major fire. If it's all conifer, it's like a big set of birthday candles going up all at the same time. So his suggestion was we should be working as a community to take out the standing dead material, thin the forest, and reintroduce things that should be there, alder, maple, and aspen.

They're cheap. We can do that with a $5 stick, you know, stick it in the ground, give it a bit of water, and you've got a better forest. So do you think that, I mean, that's sort of like a selective logging kind of situation, basically. It is. Of course, Salt Spring being famous for the environmental aspects of life here, how do you think that would actually go down with the population?

I think some amazing opportunities. Transition Salt Spring has a team of people. Ruth Waldick is an amazing resource to us on the island. She's going through and working on Maxwell Lake and she's also thinking about this. But here's the scenario that the professor was giving to me. It's all uniform, goes up, some kid is up there and he puts up a little fire. We've had cases in the Maxwell watershed of people camping and having fires because they need to cook some food. So let's say somebody wants to have a hot dog and lights a little fire and up she goes. Well, so in the professor's scenario, it won't take much on a hot, dry day in the summer, a little bit of a breeze

and you've got a perfect recipe for a thing going up like a birthday cake. So fire grows exponentially so you might have a one acre fire for a few hours and then it's 10 acres. On a windy day, it could be, you know, it'll go up. It'll be crazy. Our fire department can't handle an event like that.

So we would have to call in the province. The province, if we have these kinds of dry, windy conditions here on the island, it's probably also true that on Vancouver Island and on the other side of the pond, everybody's faced with the same issue. Are we going to get immediate response? Probably not. So maybe it's a few hours more or a day later. They finally get around to doing something.

They're going to come in with a bomber and they're gonna hit it with chemicals. So now you've got a perfect nightmare. You've got a lot of ash from the dead trees. You burned your soil. So all that, this is a thin layer of topsoil on that rock. It's gone. And you've got chemicals. In the next big rain,

it all comes roaring down into the St. Mary's Lake Reservoir. And that's our drinking water for much of North Indian, of Salt Spring. So, it's a nightmare waiting to happen. It's a frightening scenario. It is. So we would wipe out our drinking water for most of North Salt Spring. It's a crazy thought. A little bit of prevention might be the answer rather than waiting for, you know, putting our head in the sand and saying it won't happen. Don't worry about it. And then when it does happen, we're in trouble. So people should get together now and try and figure out a solution. Yeah. So the best thing that we could be doing is working with Transition Salt Spring, with the CRD, with North Salt Center Water, with the fire district,

pulling together the communities as a team and asking how can we solve this problem together. All right. Now just to segue into what individuals can do, you have a program where people can have the fire department come to their properties and tell them how best to mitigate fire on their properties by taking down trees or underbrush or whatever, right? That's true. We have something called the FireSmart program. So FireSmart is amazing. We've got an amazing team of volunteer firefighters and career staff. We have about 50 people and so if you

call into the fire department and you say I'd like to have somebody come out to my home and walk around the property with me and give me a fire smart report. So one of our team will come out and we'll say, you know, you have a conifer really close to the house. Those things on a hot summer day, you know, it's loaded with pine tar or pitch and it would just go up like a candlestick. Maybe that's not a good idea.

But if you replaced it with maybe an apple or a pear, it's a deciduous tree. It's a beautiful thing. And you've reduced your risk. You're probably going to still have a lovely tree beside the house. It's just being fire smart. We'll give you $250 if you do that. So somebody will come out and write the report. And if you say,

okay, yes, I will deal with the issues around, you know, maybe there's some dead branches that you've got by your woodshed. They'll go through and they'll identify with you the risks that you have on your property. And then they'll ask you, you know, if you come up with a plan in the next few months, yes, I'm going to get rid of those dead branches, yes, I'm going to get rid of that dead tree or the conifer, we'll give you $250. It's great.

Yeah. And they just have to phone the fire department to do that, the non-emergency number, of course. We have a wonderful person in our front office, Nancy. She'll take your call, she'll send somebody out, and we'll take it from there. Right. And you're also looking for people to sit on your new committees or committees that you're developing right now? That's true. How can they do that? It's really easy. So on our fire department website, Salt Spring Fire, just log on and you'll see there's a contact item on our dashboard on the main page and you can just make a phone call or you can register online and we are always looking for volunteers we have a committee on finance we need volunteers we have a committee on long-term planning we need a volunteer we have a committee on long-term planning. We need a volunteer.

We have a committee on the building committee. We're building this new fire hall. I think there's an opening there. And we have a new committee that we're putting together, which is Salt Spring nominations and governance. It's just how the fire department works, and we have an opening there, too. So, at least

four committees would be great. And the other exciting thing is that if you serve on one of these committees, it's kind of a training ground to be a trustee. You get involved in the fire department, you understand the issues, you're part of the team, and then if you'd like to stand for election, there are openings every year for trustee positions. All right. So lots of ways for people to get involved. Absolutely.

Yeah. And we appreciate it. We're part of the community. And, you know, I was mentioning there's a cost to this. We have 6,500 tax parcels on the island. So 6,500 pieces of property that we ask for taxation revenue.

We have a budget of about $5 million. We're asking, let me put it to you this way. We're spending $800 a year roughly for each family. If you were going to the grocery store and spending $800 on something, you might like to have a bit of input in that.

So let me just put it to you that way. We're spending $800 of your money. If you'd like to make sure that we're doing it properly and that we're reflecting your concerns, get involved. Great. Okay, thanks, Raleigh, for coming in. And you've been listening to Ask Salt Spring Answered. My name is Damien Inwood, and we're coming to you from cheer.fm,

the voice of the Gulf Islands. Damien, thank you. Thank you, Raleigh.