St. Albert was a very different place back when Darrel Bliss joined the city’s fire department. There was no St. Albert Place, no Servus Credit Union Place, and no St. Albert International Children’s Festival.
“The town was about a third of [its current] size,” Bliss recalled, and there was just one fire station with one fire truck.
Said truck didn’t have room in its cab for all the firefighters, so most of them had to ride on a backwards-facing bench on the outside of the vehicle even in -30 C weather, Bliss said.
“You’d just be hoping there would be a fire so you could get warm,” he joked.
Bliss was one of 32 members of the St. Albert Fire Services recognized June 24 during the department’s annual Alberta Emergency Services Medal ceremony at the St. Albert Inn. About 100 people were in attendance, including St. Albert Mayor Cathy Heron and Morinville–St. Albert MLA Dale Nally.
The ceremony was exceptionally swift, clocking in at less than 40 minutes, as almost everyone there wanted to get back to watching Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals that was airing at the same time. (Guests who arrived early got to watch the first period on the projector screens.)
St. Albert Fire Chief Everett Cooke joked to the crowd that he had “optimized” the ceremony to honour firefighters whilst minimizing the amount of game-time missed, and confirmed to the Gazette afterwards that the ceremony was about half its usual length. Ceremony organizers put the hockey game back on the big screens immediately after Cooke delivered his closing remarks.
40 years of fire
Bliss and fellow St. Albert firefighter Rene Dubord both received their 40-year service bars at the ceremony. The bars recognize their 40 years as firefighters and will clamp onto their blue Alberta Emergency Services medals.
Bliss said he joined the St. Albert Fire Service on June 23, 1980, having gone through 25 jobs in his 25 years alive. His father-in-law proposed that he become a firefighter, and, despite his hesitation on having to cut his hair, he agreed.
Dubord started out as a volunteer firefighter in Morinville straight out of high school in 1978, and joined the St. Albert department in 1989.
“I wanted to be a game warden,” he said, so he decided to take up firefighting and autobody repair as he earned the necessary credentials.
Dubord said by the time he actually qualified to be a warden, he was making enough money off firefighting that he stuck with it instead.
Morinville was a fraction of its current size back then and still had Hwy. 2 running through the centre of it, Dubord said. The dispatcher would summon firefighters by sounding a siren mounted on an old windmill tower, and everyone would hustle to the fire hall to don their knee-high rubber boots and knee-length raincoats.
Cooke said Bliss held pretty much every position in the fire department in his 43-year career, including acting fire chief. He joked that Bliss was “a master of retirement” due to the many times Bliss announced and then cancelled his retirement from 2020 to December 2023. Cooke noted how Dubord had risen to the rank of platoon chief and now served alongside one of his own sons.
Bliss said it was the variety and strong sense of camaraderie he felt on the job that made him stick with firefighting all these years. For Dubord, it was the chance it gave him to help his community during tough times.
Dubord and Bliss called on residents to be fire-smart this summer by not putting cigarette butts in planters, which are an all-too-common cause of fires.
