Less fires, more calls locally in 2008

West Island boroughs and municipalities followed the remainder of the Island of Montreal in fire statistics trends in 2008, seeing an overall increase in material losses due to blazes by about $8 million, an increase by approximately 2, 350 in firefighter interventions, and a decrease in the total number of buildings that caught fire by eight, newly released figures by the Montreal Fire Department revealed.

"One has to take into account that first-response unit calls are greatly inflating the number of interventions," said Aimé Charette, chief of operations for media and public education at the department.

In 2007, first-response units, trained firefighters who are rushed to emergency scenes, were implemented island-wide. Statistics regarding their interventions were added to the total count for the first time in 2008, explained Charette, which is why those numbers appear so much higher than in years past in the department's latest annual activity report.

Charette also said material loss figures may easily be inflated in a single incident depending on circumstances. "Last spring, for example, there was a major fire in a condo unit in Lachine," he recalled. "I had a fire on the third floor of 12 major condos. No destruction, but water everywhere on all floors. That cost $4 million."

The municipality with the least interventions was Senneville, which beat records island-wide as well, with just 56 calls to firefighters.

Senneville also had no recorded incidents of fires and no material losses either.

"It's nothing special we do, I think it's maybe just luck, good fortune," said Mayor George McLeish.

"We have a bit of a situation in Senneville," he added, recalling around 70 households in the small village are not hooked up to any aqueduct systems, relying on septic tanks instead. "Even when we had our own fire department, we didn't have a lot of calls," McLeish said, stating that perhaps his residents are a naturally cautious bunch.

At the opposite end of the spectrum in the West Island were the two boroughs, Pierrefonds/Roxboro and Ile Bizard/Ste. Geneviève.

Pierrefonds had the most number of interventions in the area with 2,564. It also had the most fires at 35.

"We have acquired Roxboro, which was not compounded in previous statistics," explained borough councillor Burt Ward, stating the addition of 6-7,000 people to the borough's population is bound to increase the number of interventions.

In the stats for 2007, he said, which pegged interventions in Pierrefonds/Roxboro at 1,564, Pierrefonds was calculated along with Senneville, which used to be joint to it up to 2006, when it demerged. "The figures that you have there are almost always one year behind," Ward said.

As for the high amount of blazes, Ward recalled at least two that were drug-related. "They were cultivating marijuana and the house just went on fire."

He added it would be more indicative of the seriousness of the fires to know how damaging each of the 35 fires was.

Nevertheless, Ward said the borough has a security commission that would meet with the fire department and discuss these statistics. "There is a security commission, and those are the people that would meet with (Fire Department director) Serge Tremblay and (Montreal executive committee president) Claude Dauphin," he said.

In Ile Bizard, there were $8.3 million in material losses, only second behind Town of Mount Royal on the entire island.

"You have to remember that in Ile Bizard/Ste. Geneviève, homes west of Avenue de l'Église are not connected to aqueduct systems," said borough Mayor Richard Bélanger.

"We're lucky, however to have a fire station on the island, as well as to be bordering on the lake" he added.

In December, a multi-million dollar home on Bord du Lac Street in that borough was destroyed in a blaze. Bélanger said he would not be surprised if the inflated material loss figure is largely from that fire. "We don't have that many fires in Ile Bizard usually," he said. Fire stats show eight for the borough last year in total.

Future local plans include a new fire station in Pierrefonds/Roxboro, as well as a new firefighters' training centre in the West Island, though neither have an exact location. "The new training centre should reduce the amount of movement that firefighters have to make to get to their training centres," explained Charette.

He added Pierrefonds' fire station plan is "in its embryonic stages."

Louise Tremblay, another spokesperson for the fire department, said the decision to have a new fire station in Pierrefonds was based on a number of factors, including an evaluation of how many stations are needed on the tips of the island. "We also wanted to make sure we meet provincial norms for response times," she said.

Charette said stats are analyzed very carefully when they come out every year. "There are consultation tables with municipalities and boroughs based on the stats," he said.