The Municipality of Jasper will hire 10 contract firefighters and a captain to address the staff shortage following the wildfire.
The firefighters will be on a six-month term, to be extended as needed, and the captain position would be for at least two years after the new positions received council approval at its Tuesday (Aug. 27) meeting.
“The intention there is to supplement our firefighting capacity,” said Christine Nadon, director of protective and legislative services.
“Our volunteers and our full-time staff are deeply affected by this situation, and we need better coverage.”
Due to the wildfire, eight on-call casual firefighters lost their homes, and four lost their jobs. On-call casual firefighters performed intense work in the days leading up to the wildfire and the night of July 24 when the blaze reached the townsite.
Since then, they have been working shifts as part of the Incident Management Team to continue structural fire protection activities and restoring the fire hall, trucks and equipment to reasonable standards.
“Without hiring our volunteers for shift work and bringing in fire departments from other communities to Jasper, we would not be able to meet the service levels required to keep the highway open and allow residents and businesses to occupy the town site,” administration stated in its report.
Eight contract firefighters will be hired, and the two remaining positions will be filled on a contracted casual basis by existing on-call casual firefighters.
Some full-term positions may be filled by other on-call casual firefighters, but external firefighters will likely need to be hired as well.
“Following large disasters in other communities, this is very common, very standard, to require some help, some temporary help to get things going, and which is largely funded by the disaster recovery program,” Nadon said.
She noted firefighters without housing could potentially live in the fire hall or whatever temporary housing becomes available.
A team of four firefighters will work on a four days on, four days off schedule. Two more firefighters are needed to cover days off, holidays and sick time.
The new captain position will be required to supervise the new firefighters and address the higher need for fire inspections as the community begins to rebuild.
“So, with the new builds and the remediation and everything that will be going on from a land-use planning and development aspect in the community, we do need to bolster our fire inspection services,” Nadon said.
“That was already a challenge for our [only] captain, who is now looking at training and prevention. Those are two big files, and we’re already kind of struggling with the inspections piece.”
The Disaster Recovery Program, a grant from the Alberta government, will cover 90 per cent of the cost. The municipality will cover the remaining 10 per cent.
Although the firefighter positions are meant to be temporary, the captain position could become permanent, subject to future council approval.
Coun. Rico Damota reported some residents had been dissatisfied about new positions being added to the urban planning department.
“There's a concern in the community that we're not going to be able to sustain more positions,” Damota said, noting many of these concerns had stemmed from “misunderstanding.”
Mayor Richard Ireland noted while the municipality had experienced an assessment loss of about $283 million, that was only a fraction of the overall assessment of $2.3 billion.
“Whatever I think the relatively small increase in tax burden might result from this … I think it’s fair to say that the 70 per cent of the properties that remain do so because of the valour and bravery of the Volunteer Fire Department, which has been decimated, and so this is the only way we can move forward,” Ireland said.
“This is something that needs to be done to allow us to bring our residents back, and from there, to allow visitors back into the communities.”
