NOTES Q&A interview with FIRE CHIEF STEPHEN BOYD
Fire Chief Stephen Boyd is a dynamic, energetic man who speaks like the CEO of any large corporation: concisely, succinctly and engagingly. At 63, eligible for retirement for 8 years, he is far from ready to only stoke the fires of a backyard family BBQ. Chief Boyd speaks knowledgeably and intelligently in describing and detailing the aspects of firefighting in Pickering. The opportunity of interviewing him resulted in a solid confirmation that Pickering residents are in good hands with their fire department and its capable and experienced Chief, Stephen Boyd.
- How did you come to being a Firefighter?
It wasn’t a boyhood dream. School early years were in engineering. From college, I got a job in Scarborough as a draftsman. Layoffs occurred, landing me a job with Dupont Paint Production in Ajax. The company sent me to the United States for more training, and it was in a fire fighting school. My work would be called industrial fire fighting and in conversations with fellow workers, I repeatedly heard fire fighting was a good job. I thought, ‘An interesting career choice,’ and when an opportunity to apply for that kind of work in Oshawa came up, first crack, I got hired. I was 24. The rest is history: 25 years as a firefighter, 5 years as deputy chief and then moving to Pickering in 2017, and becoming its Fire Chief in 2022. Now, 38 years in the profession where retirement at 55 is possible, Chief Boyd feels he has more work to do in Pickering Fire with strategies to enhance the City of Pickering’s Master Fire Plan. - What is the Fire Departments’s annual budget?
Our budget is divided between our operating budget of $23 million and our capital budget of $12 million, which varies due to carryovers and allocation by the City. The operating budget is used for the daily work of the department with salaries accounting for the largest portion. The capital budget deals with substantial aspects of the department, things like buildings and equipment expenditures. The average cost of a custom-made fire truck is in the $2 million plus range and takes 3 years from order to delivery.
Our station allocation is 5 stations with a pumper and a tanker in each, one arial truck and a heavy rescue truck for unique situations.
3. Turning to fire prevention in the homes, you are a strong advocate of smoke alarms. Please comment.
The fire code requires that homes have a working smoke alarm on every level of the home. Homes without such devices are liable to monetary penalties of a few hundred dollars.
Chief Boyd reinforces the importance of smoke alarms, saying, “I have never pulled a dead person from a home with a working smoke alarm.” The chief emphasizes there is nothing as important to reducing the risk of fire fatalities as a working smoke alarm. Smoke kills. If home residents are not outside at a home fire when the fire department arrives, it likely means no working smoke alarm, resulting in deaths.
He adds that a working smoke alarm may notify you of a fire problem early enough for you to act and possibly extinguish the fire.
This is a crucial area of fire prevention and defense. Landlords are notified of the need for such devices and are cautioned that if they aren’t compliant within a given time period they will be subject to fines.
4. FireSmart is a western Canada fire mitigation program where a fire possibility is assessed for your property. Does Pickering Fire have such a program in place?
That sounds like a ‘wild fire prevention’ program. We have a smaller form of that in Pickering. Our staff assigned an area, will go out and knock on doors to talk to homeowners about the importance of working smoke alarms. These staff have their work digitally recorded and consolidated to give the Fire Department a view of the safety and security of city areas in relation to working fire alarm systems. This helps us overlay data-loaded information about areas of the city, their fire occurrences, and our informational coverage there.
We are regulated by the Fire Protection Prevention Act (FPPA), which directs that homes have working smoke alarms, there be door-to-door confirmation of these alarms, that published material be available for the public and that there be responses to complaints regarding fire occurrences. Interestingly, the act does not specify the necessity of firefighters. The majority of the over 400 fire departments in Ontario are staffed by volunteers or standby personnel.
Curiously, in our responses to fire calls in your area of the city, our vehicles get photographed by speed cameras frequently, and I have to notify the city department responsible for these violations to explain that these are fire department vehicles responding to fire calls.
5. How does the department work with the public in relation to reducing the risk of fires?
Cooking/kitchen fires are our most common types of fire occurrences. To help educate and inform residents, we have inspection teams assigned to areas of the city where homes are visited, and residents are educated about fire risk minimalization. We inspect about 600-700 homes a year this way. We also try to show a visible presence, attending town halls and neighbourhood association festivities. We’ve even had fire personnel ride the GO train distributing fire safety brochures. Invite us to your event, and we’ll try to attend. Additionally, we do our own festivities like the one planned for this fall in conjunction with Durham Fire where we have tours of the fire hall, information booths, and hot dogs and drinks for the attendees.
We want people to become more aware, so our firefighters in uniform will attend hockey tournaments and go to the community mall to walk around the food court, engaging people. “Checked your smoke alarm lately?”
We are working on ways we can engage with people in gentle, creative ways. We attend Canada Day events, the Farmers Market, and Christmas ‘Light the Night’ at the Esplanade.
6. How do you deal with residents who are in violation of the FPPA alarm regulations? What demographic is the worst offender?
Well, many people are hesitant about fire personnel coming into their homes; after all, these are strangers, and we are intruding on the privacy of their residences. Seniors are particularly reluctant to have an unfamiliar person entering. They are forgetful and have mobility challenges. Our program, ‘Older and Wiser,’ responds to these needs. Our personnel are trained to minimize the anxieties residents have about home inspections. We reach out to the community by doing attendance and presentations at community events and gatherings.
7. How do you deal with the cultural diversity within our community?
That is an interesting question. We are very aware of the cultural differences in our community, the cooking differences, the differences in their home environment and the different ways various cultures respond to a person in uniform knocking on their door. Some cultures are apprehensive about uniformed personnel at their door and experience past problems of corruption and authoritarian practices. Our department has targeted programs and training in response to the cultural diversity of our community. Though our personnel speak diverse languages as the department grows and expands it isn’t possible to have many languages on every truck. We are developing hand-held multilanguage charts where residents will be able to point to their language, and we will give them the appropriately language information.
8. You do not talk much about penalizing people who do not respond to regulations about alarms and reduction of fire risk. Wouldn’t penalties be more effective in your goals of fire prevention?
One example of penalization that we carry out with no hesitation is when we get false alarms. Let me give you one real life example with a multi-unity building in the city. We were getting numerous calls from the same location with no fire happening. The landlord has been warned that they must monitor their properties for such misuse of fire alarms, and they have a limited time to respond constructively or face penalties. We have to respond to the alarm with four or five trucks, trucks that are now diverted from responding to other calls. We have sent our complete fleet to this false alarm call, and this has happened repeatedly at this location. The owner has been told they will be penalized for the cost for each truck on each false alarm call. It is the landlord’s responsibility to install the necessary visual equipment to identify the culprit. We aren’t trying to punish people. We are just trying to ensure compliance with our fire safety goals and operations.
9. The city is constantly growing and expanding. How do you keep up?
The average response time goal for our fire trucks is 4 minutes. Our goal is 240 seconds with a 4-firefighter team and 480 seconds with an 8-person team, and we try to achieve that 90% of the time. We track our responses overlaying them over areas of the city so we can see a visual of our responses throughout the city. Our most challenging areas are the rural, agricultural areas beyond the regular city boundaries.
Expansion means more congestion, and we have to respond accordingly. Pickering Fire vehicles have remote control devices to regulate traffic lights at intersections. There are some areas where we are very aware of traffic problems. GO train commuters arriving at particular times of the day means areas of the city will have much more traffic than usual. Some of our train crossings are outdated and still use drop-down barriers. The City is aware of these railroad crossing problems and plans for them with overpass and underpass construction. These things take time, and we have to manage with what exists at the moment.
The city bylaw and building code departments are aware of the need for their compliance with fire mitigation planning. Older homes built before bylaws were updated are more prone to serious destruction by fire. New homes, to which updated bylaws are applied, have different construction, better fire resistance and better traffic flow within these subdivisions.
10. What are your biggest problems?
The city growth with the modern multi-unit condos doesn’t keep me up at night. Our priorities for every fire response are life, property and environment. Many of these condos are being built with fire safety in mind. These new condos take it a step further by having sprinkler systems built-in on every floor. Homes with sprinkler systems have a much better track record of surviving fires with less destruction than homes without. However, the new three and four townhouses worry me as there is high-density construction, and these homes may not be as fire safety in their construction to the level of the new condominiums.
New homes have trusses and gables joined by low-temperature melting point metal plates. When there is a fire, the metal plates melt, and the upper level of trusses and gables come crashing down. Our firefighters examine the fire before entry. Is it a contents fire, where furniture and walls are burning, vs. a structure fire, where the upper level could be a threat of collapsing onto the floors below? This is ‘lightweight construction,’ the most dangerous in terms of potential destruction and fatalities. These kinds of home constructions worry me.
Another problem is the dispatcher spending an inordinate amount of time with a caller who cannot give specifics. “I see some smoke, just a few doors away.” And they cannot identify where the fire is or even if it is a fire. That is a troublesome call.
If I had my way every new home would have fire sprinklers installed as a priority.
11. My last question is what keeps you up at night?
Number one is the lack of universal compliance with working smoke alarms. Like seat belts in cars, working alarms will save lives. Provincially, we are approximately 2/3rds of our homes are compliant. Chief Boyd is a glass-half-empty person. A third of the provincial homes are not compliant, and that must change. Asked to recommend a smoke alarm brand, Chief Boyd said every alarm retailed today is CSA, ULC approved. He recommends the 10-year lithium-ion battery-powered models.
Almost everything else is manageable. We haven’t had a fire fatality in more than five years. We have three lines of defence in our battle with fires: public education, where we educate people about fire prevention and fire fighting in their homes; enforcement, where need people to have smoke alarms, and the proper fire separations in rental areas of homes; and emergency response which takes 80% of our fire fighting expenditures. We’re like the medical world, educate as much as possible, regulate with real strategies and finally, fight with response teams when the problem is actualized. The Pickering Fire Department works that way to ensure residents have a safe and secure community in which to live long lives. We hope that continues.
