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Plan to hire 40 firefighters in four years approved by Langley Township council

November 21, 2022

Langley Township will try to hire 40 new firefighters over the next four years, council has decided.

Councillor Tim Baillie, a retired firefighters himself, put forward the motion at the first Township council meeting since the new mayor and councillors were sworn in earlier this month.

“I don’t think, I know that this fire department is grossly understaffed,” Baillie said.

With the Township’s rapid growth, there’s a need for a significant number of new firefighters, he said.

Baillie also said the current system, which mixes full-time firefighters at some halls with paid on-call firefighters at others, isn’t providing fast enough response times.

“Paid on-call firefighting is a methodology of the past,” Baillie said. On-call members can’t simply stop what they are doing and rush to a nearby firehall like they could half a century ago, he said.

He said time is key when responding to a fire, or to a medical call. Medical calls make up more than 50 per cent of calls in the Township, and Baillie said responses are averaging 13 to 15 minutes in some cases, which he said was “inexcusable.”

Source: Langley Advance Times
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