As staffing shortages and station closures persist at the Orillia Fire Department, off-duty firefighters gathered at a city council meeting and fanned out throughout the city Monday to spread the word in an effort to put pressure on city hall for answers.
Since early August, Fire Station 2 – one of the city’s two fire stations, located on Commerce Drive – has seen repeated closures following the city’s early August decree to stop calling in off-duty firefighters for overtime amid staffing shortages.
As of Sept. 11,Brett Eeles, president of Orillia Professional Fire Fighter Association (OPFFA), estimates Station 2 has been closed for 20 days since that decision was made.
Eeles has previously spoken with OrilliaMatters about the risks north and west Orillia face, primarily due to extended response times, when the fire department operates out of Station 1 on Gill Street. He says there are firefighters willing and ready to fill in on an overtime basis to keep both stations open.
On Monday, members of the International Association of Firefighters (IAFF), some from as far away as Ottawa and Kingston, joined local firefighters to distribute 5,000 leaflets to residents throughout the city, encouraging residents to reach out to municipal politicians calling for a stop to the closures.
“We asked them to simply send an email to a councillor and ask them, straight up, to go back to staffing Station 2 the way they used to: 24/7, every day,” said Fred LeBlanc, vice president of the 13th District of IAFF.
Response times to north and west Orillia can double during station closures, LeBlanc noted in a press release, in which he called for the city to either re-institute overtime for the fire department or hire firefighters on a temporary basis to fill in during staffing shortages.
For growing communities, like Orillia, LeBlanc said the common practice is to increase staffing for local fire departments.
“They're actually increasing staff, adding more stations or adding staff to their existing stations, and staffing more trucks and staffing them all up,” he said. “That seems to be the trend of where things are moving. Here, I'm not sure why the decision was made to abruptly, and without notice, stop staffing Station 2.”
LeBlanc and Eeles said the city has not answered inquiries about its August decision, and Eeles recently filed a freedom of information request to try to find out why the decision to cut overtime was made.
“I do not know why it was made, and I'm trying to get to the bottom of it,” Eeles said.
Operating out of one fire station, Leblanc said, is unfair to the community.
“It's unfair to the community, and it's unfair to the responding firefighters,” he said. “They just ask for the right resources so they can accomplish the job that they've been asked to do, and that's to protect this community.”
LeBlanc filed to give a deputation at Monday’s council meeting, but he said the city denied him the opportunity.
Nevertheless, well over a dozen firefighters were in the audience Monday afternoon.
In his deputation notes, which LeBlanc forwarded to OrilliaMatters, he cites National Fire Prevention Association standards, which “calls for four firefighters arriving at the scene of an emergency within four minutes 90 per cent of the time,” he wrote.
When both stations are operating, the city’s fire service can cover 62 per cent of the city’s roadways within that four-minute window, but that figure plummets to 28 per cent when operating solely out of Fire Station 1, LeBlanc wrote.
Mayor Don McIsaac previously told OrilliaMatters he will call for a “comprehensive review” of the city’s fire service, but LeBlanc expressed concern such a process could take months.
“While we welcome any review, the review process takes many, many months to complete,” he wrote. “We will be well (into) 2024 before that exercise is complete. Continuing with this reduced level of service in the meantime is both unfair and dangerous for this community and its firefighters.”
With looming contract negotiations between OPFFA and the City of Orillia, city officials have previously declined to provide OrilliaMatters with comments on why the August decision was made.
McIsaac previously stated the city “will not be negotiating with the association through the media.”
Both Eeles and LeBlanc took exception to the notion that OPFFA’s decision to speak out is rooted in contract negotiations.
“There's no negotiations for many months from now,” Eeles said. “This is not a negotiation issue. This is a public and firefighter safety issue.”
“This is a public and firefighter safety issue, period. It has nothing whatsoever to do with contract negotiations that are months away,” LeBlanc said.
“It is extremely disingenuous and disappointing that the city would attempt to portray this as a labour dispute when they’re jeopardizing their citizens' safety by making them wait twice as long for help to arrive at their door during a fire or medical emergency," he added.
