Correspondence with PRRD emergency services manager

For those who are interested, here is the email correspondence between me and Ryan Thoms, the PRRD Manager of Emergency Services. I'll keep adding to it as it develops.

My original email, sent to Ryan and Al Radke (PRRD CAO) March 3:

Hello Al and Ryan,

Thank you for your time and energy spent communicating with Lasqueti people about this issue. 

I've sent the following to the Lasqueti email list.  Please let me know if I've misunderstood, got anything wrong, or left anything out. I'll amend or correct the information, or you can send it to the Lasqueti email list directly, if you like.  Send it to    email_list [at] lasqueti [dot] ca   with the exact words you'd like people to see in the text of the email.

I look forward to hearing from you.   Peter

sent to lasqueti email list  Tuesday evening:
 

my response to Ryan March 5:

Hello Ryan,

Thank you for your response to my email.

I don't understand your initial comment about the RD following its own bylaws.  You might mean something important, but I don't know what.

This whole fuss is about communication and consultation, which has not happened on this issue. It might well be, as you heard some Lasqueti people say at the February 13 meeting, that the NI911 dispatch system is the best, least-cost, most effective system. This community insists that it be consulted and involved in the assessments of the options and the decisions on which to choose.

My belief, and I assume that you agree, is that the  NI911 system would not have been fully in place before the end of March. The volunteers here would have to carry radios and receive calls from the Little Mountain NI 911 transmitter for some time before the Mt. Davie/Texada radio was in place, and before appropriate pagers will be available.

Now, because our community insists on involvement and consultation, the board decision to go with NI911 has been delayed. We are asking for a longer delay than the end of March - possibly six months, so we can examine the possible options and the pros and cons of each for the dispatch system.

We are much less concerned with the "appropriate dispatch standards". What we want and need is a system that will work well, at an affordable cost. One of our fears - and one that is enhanced by this current situation - is that "appropriate standards" for fire and emergency services will keep on being imposed on us as needing to be met.  We are a very small community, used to providing for ourselves in most instances, in many cases with PRRD help and support. Reading the 21 concerns of the FUS report, and hearing from you and others the "need to meet standards" increases the fears that we will have them imposed on us.  I do not believe that these standards always best meet the needs of our community, or our ability  to meet the costs and other requirements. We are quite happy, in many instances, to remain out of compliance with many standards.

(This is a digression, but I think important: PRRD apparently plans to spend $1.2 million for a new, 4 bay fire hall with meeting/training room. Renovations have just been completed on the old hall. There is need for one more bay for a fire truck. There are, extremely close to the hall, the school and the Last Resort buildings where meetings and trainings can be held. The need for a new fire hall is far from obvious, or even reasonable. The FUS report listed acquiring more apparatus and retiring old ones, improving driveway and lane designs for firefighting access, and building permits and inspections as being either high or critical importance.0

The level of confidence that PRRD will consult with and involve us in decisions affecting us is currently not high.

I was surprised to hear Al this morning on CBC Victoria radio talking about the situation. As far as I know, he has not communicated directly with anyone in our community. I understand that you and he and the board chair will be coming to Lasqueti to meet with us, and I look forward to that meeting and set of discussions.

Lasqueti people are discovering that the Rogers paging system works just as well as the Telus one that will be ending in a few weeks. They are also discovering some other paging and communication systems that look like they will work much better for us than the current pager system.

Again, thank you for your reply.  I look forward to our community working with you to examine the possible systems, and arriving at a joint decision on what will work best for us in the medium and long term.

Peter

Ryan's response March 5:

Hello Peter – yes you may post any of my emails.

To clarify – my comment about the importance of the Board adhering to its own bylaws comes from the fundamental point that the bylaw is the public document that describes the service that the local government will deliver to the public. This LVFD establishment bylaw was adopted in 2005 – this was before my time with the PRRD but it would have travelled through open committee meetings where it was considered and eventually adopted by the Board. I understand that you don’t like all that this bylaw says but I hope you can appreciate that your local government should follow its own bylaws. Of course the Board could consider amending this bylaw, which would then follow the established local government process to establish some other level of service, but for now the commitment as per the current bylaw is to establish communication systems that are compatible with NI 9-1-1 fire dispatch. The soon to be defunct Telus pager technology as well as the Rogers and Radio Works pagers would not be compliant with the PRRD LVFD bylaw.

Also, you say below that you are less concerned with the "appropriate dispatch standards". I would suggest that it is fundamentally unfair to request a public service provider to deliver their service below appropriate standards. I would contend this applies to any public service provider, regardless of whether that provider be your local government, or a society, or possibly even a private entity contracted to deliver a public service, so in the Lasqueti context: the Fire Department, Public dock, Lasqueti Ferry, Pete’s Lake water system, all come to mind as important public services. These services will all have standards that they are obligated to meet, and the resulting benefit for the public is that there should be a baseline of confidence that these systems are effective, and safe. Having standards is also a benefit for the service provider as it provides a means of measuring ourselves to understand if we’re delivering our service properly, instead of waiting for an accident or some other failing to learn that our service should have been better – many of the standards we follow in the fire service are the NFPA (National Fire Protection Association) standards. The NFPA is an international non-profit organization that has been working on fire service standards for over 100 years. These standards reflect many years of fire experience and ultimately have to do with firefighter and public safety and are the generally accepted standards and best practices throughout North American departments and are reflected in the BC Office of the Fire Commissioner requirements that all local fire services must meet. I’ve heard some comments that these standards don’t reflect Lasqueti Island – I would contend that fires burn on Lasqueti just the same as they do elsewhere in BC and when someone has a severe health issue on Lasqueti and call for First Responders the implications are just as serious as anywhere else in BC. I would actually contend that small rural fire services benefit from standards as much or more so than larger departments since, when our volunteers are called to respond they do so with generally much less support than a larger organization can provide – responding to an incident, sometimes in the dark with few volunteers and no other agency to ask for assistance can result in significant stress on firefighters/first responders.

So I cannot recommend to the Board that they deviate from applicable standards – and assuming this Board did choose to deviate from accepted standards, the next question would be which standards do we want to be compliant with and which ones would we choose to ignore? This would be a slippery slope that may ultimately put our firefighters or public at undue risk.

I saw a reference on the Lasqueti.ca discussion page to a UBCM study regarding the investigation of a provincial 9-1-1 service. This study says the following about standards:

The adherence to standards is one of the hallmarks of modern emergency services. The adoption of standards is critical to the efficient, safe and effective delivery of life-critical, time-impacted services. They also ensure that such services are delivered in a uniform and well understood fashion, thereby improving oversight and mitigating operational risk. In the context of emergency communication centres, established standards also enable such centres to undertake appropriate quality assurance and quality improvement reviews, with established and relevant benchmarks against which to measure performance.

If you’re interested in the applicable standards in the current fire dispatch question, you can visit www.nfpa.org where there is a free viewer. You can read standard 1061 for public safety dispatchers and 1221 for installation,  maintenance, and use of emergency services communications systems – I believe once you read these standards you’ll agree that this would be a challenge for a small fire dept to deliver on its own and this explains the reasoning behind the creation of the NI 9-1-1 service and the resulting benefit for fire services.

And I respect your concern that meeting standards implies an added cost. Certainly in some cases this may be the case; ie maintaining proper firefighter gear and proper training is more costly than choosing sub-standard options, but again I believe we are obligated to deliver this public service to applicable standards, and I believe we owe it to our firefighters to provide them with the support to deliver this service to at least minimum standards. In this particular case our staff believe that this recommendation to extend NI 9-1-1 fire dispatch to Lasqueti will be a cost savings for the Lasqueti public in the long term. There has been much concern about the cost for the repeater. NI 9-1-1 staff have given their professional opinion that they cannot deliver their service to standard without this repeater. This is the biggest single cost for beginning this fire dispatch service. However this same communications concern already pre-existed as a concern for our fire department (as highlighted in the 2008 FUS report) – the next time you go by the north fire hall please note the antenna strapped to a tall dead tree behind the hall – strapping a repeater to a snag is obviously not a long term solution for our fire communications. If we were to build a proper repeater tower ourselves it would certainly cost us a fair amount, and in the long run this local option would require maintenance to be borne entirely  by Lasqueti Islanders alone. As explained at the Feb 13^th public meeting – Lasqueti Islanders would have to pay the cost for this proposed NI 9-1-1 repeater, however once the repeater is installed it becomes a part of the NI 9-1-1 network and therefore ongoing maintenance and any repairs will be borne by all taxpayers of the 6 Regional Districts. I believe at the Feb 13^th session that there was a general appreciation that this NI 9-1-1 service would allow us to meet our fire dispatch requirements at a lower cost than if we had to bear the infrastructure and staffing costs entirely within the Lasqueti tax base.

In this current situation I’d like to assure you that staff have worked diligently to recommend the best option to maintain the Lasqueti Fire Service. There will certainly be future discussions about service improvements. Any staff recommendation for fire hall construction or new fire apparatus will almost certainly require borrowing for at least some of the required funding and will then require public support through Referendum or Alternative Approval Process so the Lasqueti public will have decisions to make on those matters.

Richard Carlson and I speak frequently on ongoing fire department operations and obviously we’ve been speaking about the transition beyond the obsolescence of the Telus pagers and we have options to maintain our fire dispatch service so there will not be a void once the Telus pagers go out of business. It’ll be important for the public to know how to call for emergency help following March 31^st, and we’ll ensure we communicate any changes with the public, and internally for our fire department, but I think it would be most fair to allow next week’s  public session so we allow for further public input and comment before making any operational decision on which option for the transition forward.

I believe the Lasqueti Fire Department provides a tremendous benefit to this community. Maintaining this service will require investments and will require this service to meet applicable standards.

Thank you again for your interest Peter and you are welcome to call or email with further questions or concerns.

sincerely

Ryan Thoms
Manager of Emergency Services

my response to Ryan, March 5:

Hello Ryan,

Thank you for your response.

The 2005 Lasqueti VFD Operations bylaw doesn't require or commit anyone to compliance with NI911 service. In Schedule 4, page 11, the Fire Department Administrative Responsibilities are set out. Under Communications, it says "Preparation of specifications for new communications systems and additions to existing communication systems which are compatible with NI911 dispatch services."  This requires only that the LIVFD prepare specifications, not that the PRRD must institute NI911 dispatch services for Lasqueti.   Perhaps that is what was intended ten years ago. I don't know.

I have no difficulty with considering moving to NI911 dispatch services. Most people in the community are willing to consider it. But we are not willing to have it rammed down our throats as seems to have been attempted. We want not only to be informed and consulted, but to be involved in generating options and deciding which one (or possibly  more than one) best meets our needs.

We've waited ten years. The staff and board at PRRD have not consulted, as is required and only decent and fair. Let's delay for one year more. The examination of options, discussions and decision is likely to take six months or so, at least far less than one year. We can manage to have whatever system we decide is best set up and ready to go with next year's (2016-17) budget. In the meantime, an alternate paging system will function at least as well as it has for the last however many years.

I don't agree that the situation is that the PRRD provides the service for us.  We provide the service, through our volunteers and our community. PRRD taxes properties to provide budget for equipment and operating costs, and to remunerate the chief. We work together, community and RD.

There are many standards that exist in BC and Canada and in the western world that Lasqueti does not currently meet. Water system is one of them. Fire department dispatch has been another one.  We are certainly willing to discuss NI911 dispatch and consider whether it will work best. It might be that there are other ways to meet the standard, especially if by that we know what the standard is. It must be more detailed than simply joining NI911.

I will visit the NFPA.org site and read the standards. We look forward to a meeting with you and Al and the board chair, whenever you can get over here. I hope it's soon.  I'm sorry that this has become a power struggle. What we both want is a good fire service that meets the needs of the community. If we work together to look at various ways to solve the problems, we can achieve this. But the community insists on being involved in the process, which must be delayed. Otherwise, the ill will that results will taint our relationship with PRRD staff and board for years to come, and you will lose our trust and respect because of the basic unfairness of not consulting with the community.

Thanks gain.  Sorry for my repetitive points. I'm trying to be emphatic and clear.       Peter