Kamloops Fire Rescue has responded to more than 10 thousand calls in 2022, which its Chief says it the highest call volume it’s seen in the last six years.
Ken Uzeloc says in general, things are simply busier as we come out of two slower pandemic years and notes that medical calls make up the majority of incidents.
“Medical calls are up around 61% of total call volume. So there was definitely an increase and we have seen that due to a result of some the struggles that BC Ambulance has been having. And of course, lots of different types of burning complaints with the population that we have out on the streets that is trying to keep warm.”
“The Fire Department is really the catch all. Police get called when there is criminal aspects. Of course ambulance gets called for medical, but anything that is critical or life threatening also does the fire department. And pretty much everything in between is fire department. So that’s everything from I think I hear smoke, I hear an alarm going off in this house, or a cat in a tree. All of those calls come to the fire department and we respond 24/7 to those.”
Uzeloc says in 2023, it will be making an effort to get more specific on the types of medical calls it attends, such as overdoses, so it can have more accurate data and budget accordingly. “We going to be doing that better in the new year. We are really looking to break down and categorize the type of calls we go to. Last time I checked, the number of times that we used naloxone this year we were up above 94 times which last year was 32 times for this same period.”
“Those are some of the things that I am looking at and hope to have discussions with the medical community about. We’re hear to augment and support our citizens of course, but some of this does fall within the realm of BC Ambulance. Use of some of our consumables such as naloxone, breathing masks that we use on calls, defibrillator pads. Some of those types of things it would be great to see some funding come to the fire department to off-set some of those calls.”
No, this is a new record this year. (For reference sake, here are the numbers for the past several years):
2017- 7967
2018- 6875
2019- 6613
2020- 5063
2021- 7982— Kamloops Fire Rescue (@KamFire) December 20, 2022
