After just under a year in the job, Yellowknife’s fire chief believes the city has vastly increased its preparedness for future emergencies.
During an open house at the fire hall on Saturday, Jay Arns told Cabin Radio the increasing severity of wildfires throughout Canada had raised the bar for “capacity and depth in fighting different types of fires,” even for municipal crews.
Increasingly, structural firefighters in Canadian communities that border forests are expected to work closely with wildland firefighters to defend the area where trees give way to homes.
The NWT government launched a new program last month that focuses on integrating the two types of fire service when wildfires threaten, including a common command structure.
The 2023 wildfires – the territory’s worst fire season on record – provided an extreme example of why that kind of collaboration is needed. Last year, firefighters in the territory said the lack of that collaboration was the biggest gap they identified when looking back on 2023.
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Meanwhile, the NWT government has ramped up its efforts to help Firesmart homes and communities, removing nearby fuels in a bid to reduce the risk that buildings catch fire.
At least six municipal fire halls, including Yellowknife, now partner with the territory to offer free home assessments that help residents understand how to Firesmart their properties.
Asked how Yellowknife’s emergency preparedness is changing, Arns said: “Our internal systems and our internal preparedness has increased tenfold. We’ve been doing some good work, for sure.”
A lack of coordinated preparation for 2023’s fires and evacuations – at various levels of government – was a key theme of multiple reviews that examined how that fire season progressed.
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Arns said Yellowknife’s fire hall now feels it has “a great support network that can support us in any tasks we come up against.”
He became Yellowknife’s fire chief last September after moving from Ontario.
Arns said he arrived to find “a well-founded, well-developed, well-rounded fire department with a lot of really good guys that are more than capable of doing anything we’ve had thrown at us since I’ve been here, so I’m excited to be here.”
