OLDS — A new fire quality management plan (QMP) has been approved in Olds to fit with a decision roughly a year ago to reduce service levels, says the Olds Fire Department chief.
Justin Andrew outlined the changes during a town committee of the whole meeting.
In essence, Andrew said, management and responsibility of above or below-ground petroleum tanks has been divested to the province’s Safety Codes Council.
Also, the inspection frequency of residential multi-use, mercantile and commercial properties has been reduced.
“These adjustments are designed to optimize service delivery while maintaining safety standards,” a town document says.
“We’ve reduced the service level inspection frequency to a request or complaint premise,” Andrew said.
“That takes away the requirement for us to inspect these properties on an interval and gives us the flexibility to try to conduct those inspections when we have time and availability, based on the full-time equivalent timeframe.”
Andrew maintained confidence that the public is still safe, despite the changes.
He assured Coun. Heather Ryan that inspections of new builds are carried out several times during the construction phase, from the beginning to the end.
“That’s the benefit that we have having an in-house inspector, is that that individual is able to keep an eye on construction at a little closer pace than what it was traditionally in the past, where you might see an inspection twice in the entire build,” Andrew said.
Andrew said staff will have a better idea of how this new system is working when quarterly reports are filed, but he suspects that “we actually have probably hit a higher level of compliance than what this current QMP would indicate for us.”
“This is a really tough one for us to report the positive outcome, simply because we don’t know how many fires we prevented through inspection, so it’s always inherently a hard thing to quantify,” Andrew added.
“But I will say that in the past, we have experienced an exceptionally low number of dollar-loss fires in our commercial and industrial sector since our fire inspection program was implemented and I truly believe that that’s not by chance, so I really hope that stays the case.”
