Our department was called into action again on June 12th at 0512hrs to a structure/wild land fire. Thanks to the professional effort from our volunteers, we were able to quickly contain the blaze through a parallel flanking attack. The original caller sent us this photo of the fire at the time it was discovered.
The Cortes Fire Department was proud to have one of our members attend a somber procession in the Central Valley of California, on Friday as a tribute to Corporal Ronil Singh, who was killed in the line of duty as he made a suspected DUI stop in Newman, south of Modesto.
He recounts :
“This was one of those times that I had a very strong feeling that I needed to go and pay my respects. Perhaps it was the picture taken a few hours before he died. You know the one, the Christmas picture with his wife and young son and K9 partner.
I flew into Sacramento Airport Friday afternoon and took a rental car and drove to Modesto. I arrived at 0830hrs. The service was scheduled to start at 1000hrs.
There was seating for 2,800 at the main venue and two overflow buildings. The service was sad, funny and moving. Corporal Singh’s large family was there. About 3,000 uniformed personnel attended. and another 1000 members of the public. After the service, there was a procession with over 500 police vehicles through town. Many people stood in the rain to honour Corporal Singh. Some had signs and flags. I was glad to be able to attend and show support to the family and law enforcement community.”
Dan Pippin
Fire Chief Emeritus
Cortes Island Fire Rescue
The Cortes Island Fire-Fighting Association will be holding their AGM
at
Firehall #1
on Wednesday, December 5th, 2018 at 7:00pm
Hope to see you there!
The Cortes Island Fire Fighting Association (CIFFA) has requested that the Strathcona Regional District (SRD) ask the citizens of Cortes Island if they are interested in adding a ‘First Responder’ (FR) capability to the CIFFA list of services.
It was the hope of the CIFFA that islanders would be able to vote on the FR proposal in a binding referendum in October and the FR program would be operational in the Summer of 2019 however, for their own reasons, the SRD has decided to have a non-binding referendum to decide if they will have a binding referendum. The SRD has indicated that a strong positive response to the FR proposal could still result in this service being initiated by the Summer/Fall of 2019.
What is ‘First Responder’ and why is the CIFFA proposing it for Cortes?
in the context of fire departments First Responder refers to the added capability of properly trained volunteer firefighters to directly respond to acute medical calls and provide basic emergency medical services until the arrival of the ambulance. The addition of First Responder capabilities in no way is designed to supplant our ambulance service but to support it.
We will be able to improve the existing emergency medical response in the following ways:
Improved response times. Province wide, the average response time by BCAS in rural communities is approximately between 45mins – 1hr. As a First responder department, we would be able to reduce this to as little as 15min. This would allow us to perform critical medical interventions before BCAS arrives.
More trained personnel. This could be critical to life if there are multiple people affected/multiple casualties, or if the ambulance was already on a call and unable to respond. As well as the possibility to speed up the patient packaging process, including simply carrying patients to the ambulance. We could expect to see up to 10 FR’s at a large incident.
More medical equipment on Island to be used during multiple calls or multiple patient calls.
Faster patient assessments. We would be able to call for resources such as Air Ambulance, or the Coastguard for medical extractions.
We have already raised money to purchase all the necessary medical equipment to become FR’s and at no cost to the tax payers of Cortes Island.
The estimated maximum budget for this service upgrade was $41,000 for 2019 and $25,000 each year after that. The higher cost for 2019 was due to the training costs for the volunteers to become First Responders. We aim to certify some of our personnel to become trainers so that subsequent training costs will be greatly reduced.
Yours truly,
The CIFFA Board of Directors
(Chris Walker, President)
(Dave Robertson, Vice-President)
(Bob Osleeb, Treasurer)
(Stephanie Asbeck, Secretary)
(Eli McKinty, Director)
(Pat Whelan, Director)
(Rick Kolstad, Director)
Chris Walker
President, Cortes Island Fire Fighting Association
The Cortes Island Fire-Fighting Association would like to thank all the amazing volunteers who helped make the Easter Pancake Breakfast a huge success. Thank You Alice for organizing and running the kitchen, with the crew of Jan, Keith and Suzanne, Deb, Doug, Wendy, Jim, Ken, Samantha, Ayami, Bobbie and Jason!
Thank You to Doone for gathering and organizing the prizes and donations for the fundraising raffle and Lovena for the advertising and marketing!
Thank you Klahoose for hosting this event in your Multi Purpose building. Thank You to all the volunteer fire fighters. Thank you each and every person and business that donated their goods and services. This years Pancake Breakfast raised $3900.00.
Big thanks to the community for taking the time on Easter Sunday to come out and eat pancakes. We couldn’t do it without You!!
The Cortes Island Fire Department has spent a successful day of training to prepare for mass evacuation events. We were accompanied by BC Ambulance Service, Cortes ESS, Quadra RCMP, Cortes Emergency Radio, the Strathcona Regional District, and the Ministry of Forests.
I would like to thank Klahoose for allowing us the use of their wonderful facility.
