Municipal politicians and staff don’t care about volunteer fire departments having proper water supplies, according to the chief of West Bay Road and District Volunteer Fire Department.

Paul Sheers’ comments to our newsroom come after his department had to call in help from several other fire departments over the weekend, to battle two separate fires on the same property, in Glendale that left a house and vehicle destroyed.

He says there is a dry hydrant that has not functioned properly for four and a half years, and they have run into a “brick wall” when asking Inverness County to have it properly repaired.

“Dry hydrants, in our opinion, are no different than municipal water systems. They are part of a county’s infrastructure. Rural areas need emergency water supply. It’s long overdue that municipalities realize this and start acting upon it,” says Sheers.

Things have changed

He says the hydrant in question was installed by their fire department in the early 1990’s but these days installation should fall into the hands of the municipality considering everything involved.

“You have department environment paperwork, permits, fisheries permits, DNR permits, highway permits, so on and so forth. This is no longer something that a volunteer fire department organization can tackle,” says Shears.

He says there is way too much administration work and too much cost.

“We are barely surviving on the area rates that are collected to keep a volunteer fire service running. That alone, try and take funds out of that for something that should be an infrastructure project,” adds Shears.

In addition to that, he says, manpower and safety are also issues when it comes to what they can use to get their water supply, and their members are getting older.

“We’re trying to be safe with what we do. There was a comment made here over the weekend, ‘Well, there’s a river right there.'”, says Shears. “Well, you know what? Yes, there is a small river right there. Unfortunately, due to the weather conditions, there’s only two to three inches of water level in that river, and unfortunately it’s a 30-foot bank straight down.”

Bringing awareness

Getting support from the public on the issue has fallen flat in the past.

Shears says, they put it in their yearly flyer but never received support.

“Not many people turned around and reached out to their council or reached out to the county. But I think people realize that this situation …there was an opportunity there to let everybody know the reason why we were hauling water from Port Hastings,” says Shears.

He adds, this time, the issue seems to have caught the public’s eye.

“Then all of a sudden, there was a ship going through the causeway, so now the rotary is backed up, so that creates more havoc trying to get fire trucks into the Tourist Bureau fire hydrant and get them back out of Port Hastings and back to Glendale,” says Shears.

Now, he is asking the public in Glendale and Kingsville to reach out to their district councillor or CAO and voice concerns.