MISNOMER
I don’t know how I got here. Somehow I developed this crazy belief that firefighters fought fires. Crazy, right? My bad.
Per capita, Vancouver is one of the country’s busiest fire departments in the country, and getting busier all the time. But almost none of that fire service activity involves firefighters marching into buildings, masks on and hoses over their shoulders, to beat back flames. As a matter of fact, if you eliminated calls for service that weren’t for fires or false alarms (which have always been inevitable but have seen a significant rise recently) you would eliminate the overwhelming majority of what these massive vehicles full of highly trained specialists spend their time doing.
To me, learning this was something like finding out that orthodontists spend their days mostly providing massage and acupuncture services. Is that a terrible analogy? It was like hearing that essential lawn maintenance and tinkering with sprinklers is what professional golfers do with their on-course time; or something like learning the only time your history professor engages with the subject is during week-long annual conferences, because they're otherwise too busy studying, publishing, and lecturing in physics.
I don't know how I missed this. Or why I didn't consider the matter more deeply than "Of course emergency services attend emergencies, that's what they're there for."
THE DEETS
In 2022, Vancouver Fire and Rescue Service responded to 92 incidents per 1,000 residents, that’s over 65,000 calls for service. (For scale, Calgary saw around half that per capita rate.) By far the largest number of emergency calls, at almost half, were medical and not fire-related (though in some parts of BC the proportion of medical calls is as high as 70%.) Of those roughly 30,000 non-fire medical calls, nearly 7,000 were overdose-related. In fact, the situation was deemed so bad on the drug overdose end that by Summer of 2022 the service was forced to cut back on the number of medical calls they were responding to. Still they managed to hit record numbers. And yet all of those record figures were beaten in 2023, and significantly so.
Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services reported 70,406 calls for service, 102 per 1,000 residents in 2023 — an unprecedented number in the city’s history. 48% of those calls for service in 2023 were medical and 9,000 were in response to overdose. Yes, some of those 70,000 calls were for fire but only a minority: just 27%. However, of those 19,000 fire-related calls, 15,000 were false alarms (up 50% from 2019) and the number of “reportable fires” (the work I always assumed firefighters to be doing) increased to a total of 4,309 (up 10% from 2022.) That’s right, just 6% of calls for service to the fire department are for actual fires. And the vast majority of those 4,000+ actual fires, 59%, were caused by what they refer to as "smoker materials" (lighters, matches, cigarettes, and pipes). Outdoor fires, which in the city are mostly fires involving rubbish or stuff set alight in alleyways, have also skyrocketed in recent years, almost doubling in just four years.
BEYOND THE SPREADSHEET
For a real picture of what all of this actually looks like on the ground, fire services have shared that in 2022, they received over 500 calls for service from a single SRO building, 300 of which were smoking-related. Imagine almost one fire-related call per day for just one small building. More recently the city reported that in a single 24 hour period, between November 28th and 29th, 2023, Vancouver Firefighters responded to 22 fire calls to this same part of downtown. Of those 22 fires, the majority were at SRO buildings involving smoker materials and intentionally set garbage and dumpster fires.
But the situation is actually far worse than that. Fire services also explain that, out of necessity, these buildings are all designated as non-smoking in the first place, so not one of those smoking-related fires should even be happening. And, too, all of this happens despite Vancouver Fire and Rescue Service offering dozens of SRO-specific fire safety and life saving courses for SRO staff each year as well as having collaborative communications and operations with BC Housing. From where I’m sitting then, that seems like criminally anti-social behaviour on not less than four dimensions.
So what do the building operators say in response? They argue that any pressure applied to prevent smoking among this population only ever results in tampering with smoke detectors and fire alarms and that their only other option, beyond signs and warnings, is to evict these people, the city’s most vulnerable population, which no one wants to do. So, in the absence of any acceptable alternatives, these fires and false alarms continue to occupy the city’s evermore pressed and costly emergency services.
For more information see:
Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs - National Fire Information Database
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