ASK Salt Spring: Answered - Ep. 52 Fire Chief Jamie Holmes

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

Damian Inwood from CHIR-FM speaks with Jamie Holmes, Salt Spring Fire Chief about the fire smart program for residents, the new $13.3-million fire hall and putting easy to read number signs on your homes to help emergency service providers to get to the right place.

you're listening to ask salt spring answered with me damian inward from cheer fm when we talk to jamie holmes the salt spring island fire chief about a number of issues including fire smarting your home and also the development of the new 13 plus million dollar fire hall on Salt Spring Island. So I'm here with Jamie Holmes. We were in Ask Salt Spring talking about a number of things, the fire smart program, the new fire hall. Welcome thanks yep now I think first off we'll just talk a little bit about the fire smart program and just for people's information as to as to how you look at this and I thought it was interesting you said you know you create a defendable space around your heart your

home right and that if you've done that if there was a widespread fire your house would get sort of priority in terms of uh of yeah i mean it boils down to any emergency uh we need to look at it like a triage and we only have so much equipment so much personnel so much water so many resources to to use in any emergency so you really need to triage houses when you get to these events. And it's the same that happens all across BC, all across the world, really. When a fire department shows up and they have their resources available, you look at a place and say, this place has a defendable space around it and we can save it and work with it,

or this fire is too big for what defendable space is there, or there is no defendable space and you have to move on to the next place. Sometimes it's hard, but, you know, incident commanders and team leaders need to draw lines in the sand and say, the fire stops here and this is where we can contain it. And those defendable spaces around houses help us shrink those lines into smaller and smaller. So it's in your interest to make sure that your house is well protected. Absolutely. So I noticed that you kind of drew it up into different things up to 1.5 meters. You're looking at things like

leaf stacks and wood piles around the house. Get those out of there, right? And then 1.5 to 10 meters, you're talking about thinning out trees and things like that, right? Yeah, and it's space, creating a little bit more space in between the vegetation kind of thing so the uh the immediate house what we're looking for is uh a true fire break so uh we don't want to see bark mulch or um you know grasses or junipers right up against the edge of the house so that you know ground fires embers don't start at the ground and then transfer to your house so we want that you know non-combustible defendable space or or green planting um you know plants that are going to hold water and moisture so that they're you know they may shrivel and they may die in the

case of a fire coming up to it but they're not going to support fire so that's what we want right against the building and then as we move away from the building we want uh you know you can introduce other types of uh vegetation and stuff but we want them to be thinned we don't want massive spacing so that they're not fueling each other i think and then as we go farther away you know 10 plus meters and you know up to 30 meters we want to thin trees basically ladder fuels from bottoms to the top so we basically want to turn from from your home to a forest you can kind of think of it as a gradual scale of you know nothing right beside my home will burn to you know a complete forest uh as we go farther away yeah so just merely having a tree within 30 meters of your house isn't going to affect things

right no i mean that's what we talked about when when fire smart first came out there was this uh fear that we were talking about moonscaping and paved paradise and you know knocking down everything and that by we want to make sure that everybody is uh very uh or understands where we're coming from and we're being very clear that that's not what we're looking for. What we're looking for is defendable spaces. So create opportunities for air breaks and spaces, green spaces between the forest and your house. And people can get an assessment from you by going onto your website, right? And putting in a request for you to come out and look at their homes and give them advice on what to do. Correct. So www.saltspringfire.com. You can click

on the FireSmart tab. There's lots of information itself on the FireSmart tab, but there is also a calendar that you can sign up for assessments and we can do individual assessments. We can do community assessments if neighbors want to work together. There are recognized fire smart neighborhoods on the island, Maracaibo, Narrows West, I think Roscommon. So even the small communities in town have taken fire smart approaches and changing out some of the landscaping vegetation for more greenery, more wet, more deciduous type of plants. Now, I gather that you're kind of moving towards a neighborhood base where if you get, you know, a bunch of neighbors get together and they can ask for you to send a chipper out, right? Or not for you to send it, but they can get a chipper and then you'll give them a rebate. Yeah. So the rebate program, some of the listeners may be familiar in the past was a, was a home-based rebate. So homeowners rebate.

And this year we've kind of focused that more towards community or neighborhood based rebates. So we can, I believe that it's up to a thousand dollars to, if you have receipts for chipping and cleaning and things like that, that you can get a rebate through the fire department to help offset some of those costs. Right good. Okay another thing that came up which was very interesting to me because

I have what you would call an arts and crafts sign for my street number and you brought in a very nice blue and reflective house number sign, which are available for $60, I think you said. I don't know if people realize what the CRD bylaw actually says, but it's pretty specific, isn't it, about what you have to have outside your house on Salt Spring? Yeah, absolutely. So there are a lot of creative and wonderful signs out there and we're not saying get rid of those ones we're just asking people to think about also adding the reflective style signage that is visible on both directions at the end of their driveway and whether it's a medical or a fire or any other emergency, you don't really want emergency crews searching for your house and your location.

So those signs can save a lot of time right off the bat and are pretty important. So we encourage... Particularly on narrow streets where you don't want to be backing up for a long way, right? If you miss the house, you probably can't turn around for quite a while, you know? Yes, yeah, no, for sure. And as, you know, mentioned in there, in Assault Spring as well, it's just a lot of people kind of focus their sign

on the direction that they normally travel, but fire halls and fire department members coming from different routes, we want to make sure that those addresses are visible from both directions so that we can get them, we can see them no that those addresses are visible from both directions so that we can get them, we can see them no matter which way we're coming from. And they're supposed to be three to four feet off the ground with two-inch numbering if

it's reflective, right? Yes. And bigger if it's not, right? Yeah, on contrasting backgrounds. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. So, yeah, we talked about limbing trees as being one of the things that people could do. And I thought your comment about shake roofs was interesting where you said that I think somebody,

it was an Australian fire department guy came over and said, why are you putting kindling on your roof? Yeah, we had an Australian wildfire specialist over 10 years ago now that came and did some presentations. And it was kind of before BC was even on the FireSmart radar. We were just starting to look down those ways. And so one thing they noted when they went around different subdivisions is they found it very peculiar why we were putting kindling on our roofs because in fire situations and also, you know, we see it in chimney fires as well. Houses burn from the top down when embers rain onto your shake roof and it's a perfect kindling up there that's all stacked one on top of the other. And the ember just burns away unnoticed until it's something bigger and a bigger problem.

It's too late by then, probably. Yes. So while we know it's not in the cards for everybody to just re-roof their houses all the time, when that shake roof starts to break down and you need to re-roof anyways, we'd certainly encourage to look at something that is a little bit more fire-resistive, whether that's metal roofing, terracotta, slate. There are a lot of options besides the asphalt shingles that not everybody wants necessarily on their house, but there are other options. Yeah. Now let's get to the fire hall. It came up fairly late on, but now I remember seeing the sign go up

and the shovels on the ground and all that stuff, and that's been at least, I think, a couple of years ago. And I've been watching as, you know, some of the slab seems to be going down and stuff, right? So where are we at with the fire hall now? Yeah, so the foundation of the fire hall now yeah so the foundation of the fire hall is uh complete to date right now um and so from here on out you should actually start to see the the building rise uh there is a large amount of concrete underneath there and uh in these

bigger steel buildings and um with the apparatus bays and everything being so open uh it actually is a lot of uh wind load wind load and snow load and everything like that so the engineering that goes underneath that that most people will never see or know about after the building is done is where we've been spending all our time and resources right now so are there a lot of concrete piles and things going into the ground to support the weight of everything yeah so uh so like you know a number of those footings uh underneath were um you know kind of like six feet wide three feet deep and uh you know the length of the building so you can imagine a lot of steel in there to um support it a lot of concrete uh in place that just takes time to not only lay out and get straight,

but to design and make sure that the loads and engineering-wise are all taken care of. Yeah, and you said there's been a delay in some structural steel and glulam products. A little bit. We're probably going to be a month or two behind our schedule at this point where we had our timelines put out. But we are working on trying to do other areas that we can accomplish while we wait for that. Unfortunately, structural steel and structural wood are kind of one of those pressure points where a lot of things rely on those to be done before. But we can continue on with the host tower because it's concrete work and other site improvements as well while we kind of wait for those to be manufactured in Shemainis and Colwell Hill.

Right, and you're still looking for spring 2026 as your opening date? Yeah, we're hopeful. Everybody, just like when you're building a house, you want to be in by Christmas. So our hope is still be in by Christmas, but really a true opening is still kind of slated for the spring of 2026. And you're still on budget, you said. Still on budget.

And that's 13.3 million. For the complete project, yeah. So we're still borrowing from the referendum was the 9.7 approval for borrowing, and that's still we are not borrowing any more money than that. There's been a few adjustments along the way of things you're not doing that you talked about doing originally, like the underground storage tanks. So now you're putting in a big pond down in Fulford instead, right? We're going to look at it. So that's the direction. Just this whole project, I mean, we're always conscious of budget. And so it's one of the reasons why after referendum, it was over a year before we put a shovel in the ground, because

we wanted to make sure that we explored every opportunity, every Avenue and said, you know, this is earmarked in the project. Is there a cheaper or better or more efficient way to do it than what we're doing? And so we did spend some more time in, in the design phase than, than others may have for the building. But for us budget was so important that the extra time was worth it and maybe we just got lucky but as we were doing that insurance rate or sorry interest rates also were dropping so we actually saved money we actually ended up saving money by actually taking our

time and doing things a little bit slower. Now, talking about insurance, I hadn't realized that there's something on your website regarding the tender shuttle accreditation, which is a good title. But maybe you can explain that a bit more. Yeah. So through the FireRiderRiders survey, we have to perform a test every five years we've actually it's been a little bit longer than five years for us just because of COVID delayed everything and slowed things up for us but so it's time for our renewal from our from our 2015 test so the tender shuttle accreditation test basically what we have to show the fire underwriters is that we can move a certain amount

of water over a period of time to show that in essence, it's like having a fire hydrant at the end of your driveway or for your house fire. So it gives the same rating to the whole community of Salt Spring as if you're in a hydrogen area, as long as you're in the parameters of eight kilometers of a fire hall and five kilometers of a water source. So that map is on our website, saltspringfire.com. You can click on Tender Shuttle. There's a little picture of a, like a little icon of a truck. If you click on that, it'll open up the map, which will show you if you're in the area or not, and it'll show you the recognized water sources.

And you can send that to your insurance company, and they might give you a break on your... They might give you a break. Now, insurance companies always win, unfortunately, but if we can save any money, we're hopeful that the community can get some savings from that. And I guess one last question for all the ladies on the island. Will there be a calendar this year? There is a calendar this year. The Salt Spring Fire Association actually put together a calendar.

They put a calendar of their pets together. So there is some great pictures of some of the different pets from our members with our fire trucks or fire-themed background and stuff like that. So they are available at some of the stores around Salt Spring or I think we're down to our last 20 or so at the fire hall. All right, okay, so rush down and get one. You betcha. Okay, well, thanks, Jamie, for coming in.

Appreciate it, thanks for having me. Okay, you've been listening to Ask Salt Spring Answered on CHEER FM. We are the sound of the Gulf Islands.