New rescue pumper on order for Taber Fire Department

Posted on October 10, 2024 by Taber Times

By Trevor Busch
Taber Times
editor@tabertimes.com

While the general public might be fascinated to learn about major structure fires and emergencies throughout a given year, fire departments and their firefighters and staff are all about trying to prevent these situations before they ever start.

So when a year passes by without too many major incidents, that doesn’t represent a failure. Rather the reverse.

“We haven’t had any major fires this year. We are on pace to normal call volume. We’re at 220 calls for the year. Our breakdown is pretty standard as normal,” said Steve Swarbrick, assistant fire chief with the Taber Fire Department. “It’s just been a standard year. The fact that we haven’t had any major fires is, I hate to claim it, but another feather in the cap for fire prevention. I think we’re doing a pretty good job as a community, and I stress community on that. It’s not just our fire department, it’s the whole community. They’re very receptive to it and some of the practices that we preach to the kids.”

For Swarbrick, the community’s fire prevention efforts are highlighted as a significant factor in the lack of major fires.

“We’re fortunate as we operate in the town limits, and although it was a very initially wet year for the province, it did dry out and there was lots of high hazard areas throughout the province – the entire province – and just because we’re irrigated within town limits we don’t have as many cautions as our friends in the rural areas are faced with. So for us, as far as a fire ban, we do ban permits and such, but backyard fire pits are still allowed throughout our town throughout the season. We haven’t had any issues that way.”

The department handles a variety of calls, including medical first response, alarms, and grass fires, with 30 per cent of calls being medical first response.

“Thirty per cent of our calls are always medical first response, where we help the ambulance on high end calls. Our next biggest probably would be alarms. Lots of people say false alarms, but often they’re not false alarms. They’re just not the big fire that everyone expects when someone burns their supper and it sets off a smoke alarm and the fire department responds. That’s actually what’s supposed to happen. So it’s not really a false alarm. So that’s another high percentage of our calls. The alarms, thankfully, a lot of them are not major fires,” said Swarbrick.

With Fire Chief Steve Munshaw broadening his roles with the town to take on other management in Recreation, Swarbrick has been tasked with some added duties in 2024.

“It has increased a little bit on two different sides. I take on a little bit more operations. And Assistant Chief West has taken on a little more of the emergency management part.”

Recruitment has been good, with Swarbrick noting that the spring class had 10 members, with five remaining, and the current intake is interviewing seven candidates. The department currently has 31 staff members and volunteer firefighters, and does two recruitment drives annually.

“It’s good, excellent. We’re still getting lots of applicants.”

The department is anticipating delivery of a new Rosenbauer rescue pumper sometime in 2026.

“We do have a truck that was put on order this year,” said Swarbrick. “It’s a rescue pumper, so it’s replacing one of our rescues and our extra engine. So it’s a combined unit that’s new for us. We haven’t had a rescue pumper before but it will complement our fleet well.”

Community outreach and fire prevention is key to keeping people safe, and Swarbrick notes the Taber Fire Department is heavily involved in these activities throughout the year. 

“We talk to the community throughout the year, not just Fire Prevention Week. Often I tell people in other communities we see 2000 kids a year – easy – where we’re giving fire prevention information and lessons for the kids. We have a very unique program here – the fire prevention is a fire safety and prevention program. Not a lot of communities are able to do that, and thankfully, we’ve got service groups and businesses that support it. It runs on a budget supported by those community groups of about $12,000 a year, and that covers all of our crayons, colouring books, fire prevention items, the smoke alarm exchange program. That’s huge, definitely not all communities have it. I get that question a lot when we do some of the community fairs or the markets we are able to go to, people from out of town will ask, ‘Does every department do this?’. No, they don’t, nothing like what we’ve got going on this year. Actually, we were contacted by Picture Butte. They’re getting a lot of information from us and learning from it, they’ve come up with their program for their community as well. So it’s kind of a little feather in our cap that people are taking notice and regional interest.” 

The Taber Fire Department was called in for assistance in late July for a major blaze in Coaldale at a recycling facility, 2Point0 Recycling.

“We did get called in for mutual aid with Coaldale. That was the recycle center fire. We were up there for eight hours giving them a good knockdown on the fire, something that was a little more that they could handle. I shouldn’t speak on behalf of another department, but I believe that was not their first fire there,” said Swarbrick. “So they called for our truck, and we were able to deploy it out there with them. They have a sister to it, the same truck, and the two trucks were able to allow backhoes to split the pile, so it actually made the fire more manageable so they could then cover it with the engines that they had. So we were released after the eight hours. They were very, very grateful.”

Volunteers from the department are always on hand at community events.

“We do lots of medical standby as a volunteer opportunity for the rodeos and such,” said Swarbrick. “We did do the bike races, the Old Man Mayhem and Taber Tough (Trail 77). We do stand by for that. That’s a good opportunity for our members to volunteer their time.”