Jess McDiarmid
Northern News Services
Published Friday, December 7, 2007

YELLOWKNIFE - The city isn't meeting its target response times and provided "incorrect information" in the 2008 draft budget that bumped two firefighter positions previously planned for next year, according to the local firefighters' union.

Craig Halifax, president of the local firefighters' union, told council on Monday that emergency response times are falling within the city target of five minutes, nine seconds, less and less. "We don't consider the statement, 'It's a matter of seconds,' as a catch phrase," he said. "For us, it's a matter of life and death." - Jess McDiarmid/NNSL photo

Under the "effectiveness measures" line of the public safety draft budget, the average time for the fire department to respond to 90 per cent of the general public is listed as 5.09 minutes, which is the same number as that listed on every budget since 2004. In the 2002 and 2003 budgets, that number was five.

"From our standpoint, especially when positions are being cut from us when we truly need more staff, it's pretty evident ... (council's) not receiving complete and appropriate information," said union president Craig Halifax.

Response times are a key benchmark for emergency services in determining staff increases, policy changes, new stations and equipment, said Halifax.

A union report presented to city council at a special meeting on the budget Dec. 3 stated the fire department's response time was shorter than 5.09 minutes in only 46 per cent of fires it attended. Emergency medical service response times were shorter than 5.09 minutes 69 per cent of the time.

And the number of responses falling within the 5.09 minute range has been progressively falling since 2003, Halifax said in the presentation urging council to bolster the 20-member strong department. Firefighters' effectiveness at saving lives and property, as well as their own safety, is significantly reduced after five minutes, according to studies included in the report.

The union asked for 12 more full-time firefighters as quickly as possible, which would enable them to run eight-person shifts with a minimum of six. That way, two firefighters could respond on a medical call and four would still be there if a fire broke out.

City administration told Yellowknifer in a Nov. 15 e-mail that the fire department's response time was five minutes 90 per cent of the time, which was on target.

But following the Monday evening presentation, Mayor Gordon Van Tighem and other city officials said the 5.09 figure listed in the budget is a goal, not an actual response time.

Elsewhere in the budget document, it's stated that an objective for 2008/2009/2010 is a three-to-six-minute response time to 95 per cent of the city's population.

According to Halifax, the union used information taken directly from the reporting database at the fire department.

The union calculated the response time as the length of time that passed between dispatch receiving the call and the arrival of the first fire department unit on scene, which is the standard calculation used across North America.

Fire Chief Reid Douglas said there are many components to response times: time spent on the phone with the caller, relaying the call to the fire hall, leaving the hall and driving time.

Firefighters must be called into the station eight to 10 times per month, the chief said.

"The union's not telling an untruth because when you factor every single call we do, yeah, if you average everything out and you factor in calls that take us 12 to 15 minutes to get people into the station ... of course the response time is going to be greater."

But reading through the day logs for October, most of the response times were well under five minutes, he said.

"So when I say 5.09 I'm not exaggerating on an average. I'm taking the calls that are not anomalies, they're our bread and butter calls where we have crew in the station and that's what I base it on," said Douglas. "Other times on a Saturday night we may have to put a call in at three o'clock in the morning ... and it may take 10 or 12 minutes to get somebody in ... If you take that 14-minute call and take that as five per cent of the time we can't meet the standard, we're not being dishonest there."

He said there wouldn't be a fire chief on the planet who didn't want more staff but that Yellowknife's department does an "excellent job" for the community and it's up to council to decide the staffing levels.

"Are we meeting our mandate? Yeah, we are," he said. "Could we meet it better? Sure we could. But then again ... so could every department. You do the best you can with what you have."

Van Tighem said emergency responses are under the objective of 5.09 minutes and some that required call-ins of other firefighters "skewed" the average. Code 3 life-threatening emergency times were well under, he said.

City councillors at the Dec. 3 meeting said they would be expecting explanations about the discrepancies between the numbers in the budget and those provided by the union at budget deliberations next week.

"That's something I'd like to get an answer to," said Coun. Kevin Kennedy.