The City of St. Albert will once again benefit from provincial grant money to provide firefighting and emergency-management training.
Alberta Municipal Affairs announced $650,000 in grants under the Fire Services Emergency Preparedness Program this week, with St. Albert and regional partners getting a $23,000 cut.
St. Albert Fire Chief Ray Richards explained the two components of the grant, $18,000 for firefighter training and $5,000 for emergency management training, are both split with regional partners.
This is the fifth year the firefighting grant was awarded jointly to St. Albert, Lac St. Anne County, Morinville and Spruce Grove, meaning it amounts to just $4,500 for each community. That's nonetheless a significant contribution to local firefighter training, nearly a fifth of the annual budget.
"It does help us out, but it probably only covers one or two of the platoons because those courses are very expensive," he said.
The grant allows for money to be spent on a handful of basic firefighting courses and some higher-level courses as well, which is typically where the city's training money is directed – being a paid department all the members already have their basic training.
Mostly the city department spends its training money on pump-operator courses and officer training.
"Every year we have people who need to be trained as people move up through our organization," Richards said. "For example, if someone is promoted to captain they don't necessarily run the pump any more."
He emphasized training dollars are stretched further by working with regional partners to find efficiencies. For example, there is no live-fire training ground in St. Albert; instead local firefighters train at nearby facilities in Spruce Grove and Morinville.
Those joint-training opportunities have the added benefit for ensuring city firefighters and their mutual-aid partners have a pre-existing working relationship in the event of a call that requires them to call in those partners.
"It's very critical to understand how each of us is working," Richards said. "It's really important we practice that."
Emergency management
This is the second year St. Albert and Spruce Grove have been jointly awarded $5,000 for emergency-management training as well.
Last year the money was spent on communications training, and this year Richards said the money would be spent to run a joint tabletop training exercise – simulating a major emergency incident and the subsequent response.
"You can do something a bit larger and bigger between the two communities," he said. "We can activate our emergency operations centres and just see how we work together in a major incident."
