Fact or Fiction

Not sure if it is the election in the air or what, but there seems to be a lot of misinformation about the fire department operations out there right now. I will try to clear some of that up with answers to the five most common rumours.

1) The first rumour is that the "fire department is overstaffed". As of the moment the fire department has five full time employees. Four firefighters and the fire chief. Of this, two are on duty from 7:00 am to 6:00 pm daily. They work a four day on, four day off rotation. During Monday to Friday, the Fire Chief is also in the office. This means that there are two firefighters available during the day + the fire chief on weekdays. The remainder of the fire department is VOLUNTEER. Almost the entire volunteer compliment of firefighters work in GREATER VICTORIA. There are only a small group that actually live and work in Sooke. This means that during the day, it is not unusual to have NO volunteers show up to assist the two career staff on duty although some days there may be as many as six. Therefore it is somewhat difficult to say that a staff of two would be considered overstaffed.
By the way, there are NO firefighters in the station from 6:00 pm to 7:00 am daily. If a call comes in, volunteers are alerted by pager and must respond from home to the station and then get their gear on, get on a fire truck and then respond.

2) Rumour #2. "Volunteer firefighters get paid too much." Volunteer firefighters in Sooke get paid $0.00 per call. Off duty career staff that respond on hours when they are not working get paid $0.00 per call. (they do not get overtime or days off in lieu either) I don't know how you can get more cost efficient than 0. Should we now make the volunteers pay to go to calls? Might make recruiting a little difficult. Volunteers don't even get reimbursed for their gas money. This is a true committment to help their community.

3) Rumour #3. "We don't even need a fire department". If the fire department ceased to exist, the average homeowner insurance policy would triple. Commercial rates would likely be even higher.

4) Rumour #4 "Sooke has too many fire trucks" With the current compliment of fire trucks, Sooke Fire Rescue Service meets the requirements of the 1986 Fire Underwriters Survey requirements for fire apparatus. This means we have sufficient apparatus to meet the needs of this community when it was evaluated 25 years ago.

5) Rumour #5 "Emergency Services in Sooke cost the taxpayers too much money" On a straight per capita basis (not really a fair way to evaluate this, however) the cost per person for Police and Fire Service in Sooke works out to $0.55 per person/ per day. This is much less than a cup of coffee at a local fast food restaraunt. If you want to divide by actual services, the fire department cost is $0.20 per day per person and policing costs are $0.35 per person per day.

If you have any other questions or concerns about the fire department, please call us. We would be happy to answer your enquiry.