Two Niagara municipalities are accidentally doing the right thing, but will probably get bullied into chickening out and going back to doing the wrong thing. The right thing being consolidating the bloat atop their fire departments and sharing a single fire chief.
Before we get into that though, let’s first address the issue posed by writing, suggesting, or whispering anything even remotely critical of firefighters or fire departments. I know I’m going to get all manner of angry emails about this column. People love firefighters. That’s fine.
But I do think at least part of the reason people idolize firefighters is because of a misconception that it’s a “dangerous” job where they put their life on the line daily. It’s not and they don’t.
People think being a firefighter is dangerous, but according to statistics from the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety, injury and fatality rates for firefighters don’t even put them on the top 10 most dangerous jobs.
You know the guy who collects your trash from the curb on garbage day? He’s doing a far more dangerous job than any firefighter. Those guys driving the garbage truck and picking up your trash, they die from on-the-job accidents 1,200 percent more often than firefighters.
Even this makes trash collectors only the 11th most dangerous job in Canada, behind fishermen, miners, loggers, construction workers, transportation workers, pilots, roofers, hydro workers, steelworkers and farmers.
People think being a firefighter is dangerous because they watch too many cheesy television dramas where firefighters rush into burning buildings, which, generally speaking, they don’t actually do in real life. Standard firefighter protocol is “surround and drown” meaning stay outside the building where it’s safe and spray water in through the windows.
Very, very few firefighters die fighting fires. A University of Fraser Valley study of firefighter fatalities in Canada between 2006 and 2018 found that of the 738 reported firefighter deaths, only about 5 percent were from “traumatic injury,” while more than 90 per cent were caused by cancer. That’s not to downplay the very real cancer risk that firefighters face from smoke inhalation—all I’m saying is that, even when you include cancer-related deaths as “on the job” fatalities (which no other occupation does), the stats still don’t support the pervasive idea that being a firefighter is inherently dangerous, relative to dozens and dozens of other ordinary jobs.
All right, now that everyone hates me for pointing that out, let’s talk about why Port Colborne and Wainfleet are doing the right thing by sharing a single fire chief.
Port Colborne’s fire chief is leaving. Rather suddenly too, which doesn’t give the City enough time to find a new one before he leaves. So they’ve decided to explore the idea of sharing a fire chief, which takes the form of a 120-day trial wherein the Wainfleet fire chief will do double-duty and also serve as Port Colborne’s chief.
Good idea, but let’s take it a step farther.
From now on, anytime a fire chief in Niagara quits or retires, we should simply roll the fire chief duties into the next municipality until we have just a single fire chief across Niagara.
The fire chief is typically one of the highest paid jobs at any city hall (north of $150,000 at most Niagara municipalities), so the cost savings alone would be more than a million dollars annually.
We have one police chief, we can make do with one fire chief. This would also solve a major problem with Niagara’s fire departments, which is the constant merry-go-round of fire chiefs and deputy chiefs moving around from department to department.
The whole reason Port Colborne is in this predicament is because its fire chief quit to become the deputy chief in Niagara Falls. The City also has no deputy chief because he recently left for the Thorold fire department. A few years earlier, Thorold’s fire chief quit to become the fire chief in Fort Erie. And so on and so forth ad nauseam. The upper levels of fire departments in Niagara are a never-ending game of musical chairs, and the best way to put a stop to that nonsense is to just have a single fire department.
Doing so would also go a long way towards appeasing the province, which is breathing down Niagara’s neck to find ways to be more efficient and share services. Streamlining our bloated fire department upper ranks seems like a great way to get them off our back.
But hey, what the heck do I know about any of this. I am but a lowly reporter. Which, according to workplace fatality statistics is actually much more dangerous than being a firefighter.
James Culic would never, ever say a bad word about the guys who collect his trash, they are true heroes. Find out how to yell at him at the bottom of this page, or pull the alarm and write an incendiary letter to the editor.
