GUELPH/ERAMOSA — The Guelph/Eramosa Fire Department needs a proper place to store training equipment. First, they intended to put up a building at a cost of $600,000. Now they intend to build a mezzanine for it, with a cost of $110,000, saving the township $490,000.
Fire chief Jim Petrik gave a short presentation to the Guelph/Eramosa council Wednesday afternoon. He explained to council the need for $110,000 to build a mezzanine to store training material within the fire hall in Rockwood.
Initially, Petrik explained, the fire department wanted another building to store the training material.
“Our development charge planning had involved the construction of a separate building on the fire department property to provide storage opportunities. The estimate of that was around $600,000,” Petrik said.
It was found that instead of a separate building, a mezzanine could be built within the existing fire hall to store the training material.
“In re-evaluating our needs, we realised that there is an opportunity to scale that back, build it within the existing building infrastructure and reduce the costs significantly to approximately $110,000 down from $600,000,” Petrik said.
So Petrik is requesting the funds to go ahead and build the mezzanine.
“We have sufficient development charge funds in place to support that. So we’re requesting funds to go ahead with that construction project,” Petrik said.
As firefighters must meet increasing training requirements, the fire department needs more training material.
“With the certification requirements that are increasing in the fire service, we’re acquiring more and more training material that’s necessary for the additional training requirements. And this is just space that will allow us to store it efficiently and safely within the fire hall,” Petrik said.
The fire department needs another $150,000 to purchase new bunker gear and personal protective equipment as the current gear will soon reach its expiry date.
Seventy five thousand dollars was allocated to this purpose last year. So the fire department needs another $75,000 this year.
We "request $150,000 to support the purchase of new bunker gear and other pieces of protective equipment to replace bunker gear that is expiring,” Petrik said.
Buying new equipment also ensures that fire fighters have back up personal protective equipment.
“And this also allows us to comply to NFPA regulations that require fire departments to provide two sets of personal protective equipment to their firefighters in the event that one set gets contaminated they have another set that they can use for emergency responses,” Petrik said.
At a certain point in time, the fire department’s radios will no longer function. The fire department needs to be ready for that with radios that work.
“So in the middle of next year, our radios will in essence no longer be useful and we’ll have no opportunities for onsite communication which is obviously not feasible,” Petrik said.
New radios will cost $76,000, to be funded through reserves.
The pagers the firefighters are using to get calls end up being well worn. So every second year, pagers are either bought new or repaired.
“And this is a year we request funds to support replacement and repair of these pagers that kind of go into harsh environments and so they’re subject to somewhat of a predictable replacement program,” Petrik said.
“And we’re requesting $5,000 from reserves to fund that as well,” Petrik said.
Jesse Gault is the Local Journalism Initiative reporter for GuelphToday. LJI is a federally-funded program.
