Expect to see a few extra firefighters in the east end this week.
The Timmins Fire Department is taking part in training exercises focused on wildfire fighting, should one get close to the city.
“If those fires start encroaching on the town itself, how do we get there and what do we do?” said Timmins Fire Department chief of training Scott Foster.
The program is a two-day course, with three groups of 20 to 30 firefighters, starting Monday, May 26, and running until June 1. The first day of the course is mostly classroom work, but tomorrow (Tuesday) they’ll take those lessons out into the community.
The training is in Porcupine in the Boucher, Duke, Earl, Krznaric, Marquis, and Princess Street area, near the Porcupine River. Firefighters will work on risk assessment, prioritization, and coordination in a wildfire situation.
“They’ll be kind of tucked away in the back 40, but they’ll be going house to house, looking at the bush line intersects with the houses back there in different scenarios,” said Foster. “The fire is an hour out from this house. What do we do?”
This program is funded by a federal grant, and this is one of the first times this training has taken place in Ontario.
“They started this last summer, out west in BC around Kelowna, and now they’re trying to develop it in the rest of the country,” he said. “We’re trying to roll this out here.”
The training is for full-time and volunteer firefighters in Timmins, and staff from Kirkland Lake are participating as well.