Standard Fire Association is one of the many Wheatland County Firehalls and they will be recruiting new volunteers in the coming weeks.

Standard Fire Chief, Mark Duguay, explains what potential volunteers should keep in mind. 

“No previous qualifications are needed because we offer competency-based in-house training. What we're looking for is people that want to better the community. There's a certain response time that we need from them. So where they live would affect which fire department they work at.”

For anyone curious about what you may learn from volunteer firefighter training, Duguay explains the process recruits will go through, 

“Our training officer, who is also myself, will go through a three-year preset training course with volunteers. We go over everything that they would need to know from medical calls to vehicle accidents to fires. We train them to make sure that they're competent in what they're doing and that they're comfortable with it. We know with volunteers, not everybody is comfortable with everything so we won't put them in a situation where they're not comfortable either.”

The majority of calls Duguay and his firemen get are medical calls. These deal with broken legs to heart attacks and everything in between. Duguay also illustrated what kind of mindset he is looking for in a volunteer.

“We're looking for people that want to better the community and one of the things they're going to find with these fire departments is that a lot of them don't just become people you work with, they become family. We're very close as we go through a lot of hard things together. But we have people that you can talk to about those things as well, so it's a very close-knit family.”

The impact of local fire halls on the community they serve shouldn't be undervalued as they provide both peace of mind and comfort in emergencies as Duguay describes.

“It's a safety aspect, they know that our volunteers are well trained. They know that we're dependable and that we're going to be there for them, no matter what's going on there will always be someone there. Because when they call us it's their worst day, not their best day.”

For those interested in volunteering or have questions, please call or email Deputy Regional Fire Chief Tom Jukes at 403-361-2165 or thomas.jukes@wheatlandcounty.ca.

 

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