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Grand Forks Fire Rescue and Midway Volunteer Fire Department in mutually beneficial deal

Grand Forks Fire Rescue will sell a vehicle to Midway's dept. at a good price, Midway Fire Chief Walt Osellame will give free training.
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Grand Forks Fire Chief Dale Heriot says that a rural fire protection district-owned fire tender will be sold to Midway's fire department at a manageable price and in return

Grand Forks Fire Rescue and the Midway Volunteer Fire Department are involved in a mutually beneficial deal for equipment and training.

The department in Grand Forks (on behalf of the rural fire protection district) will sell a fire water tender (ground water tanker), four breathing apparatuses and fire hose to Midway at a reasonable price and in return, Midway Fire Chief Walt Osellame will come in to provide training to Grand Forks firefighters at no cost to the department.

Grand Forks Fire Chief Dale Heriot didn’t want to comment on how much the deal would be worth and said that the training is beneficial, as Osellame is a certified trainer for the College of the Rockies.

“We’re doing a certification program with our guys right now. Normally we would be charged for that, for (Osellame) to come in to do the testing, and we’re getting that free of charge. We’re getting a fire service instructor course free of charge and some other courses that we’ll agree on and he’ll provide for us free of charge,” Heriot explained.

While the Midway department is getting some older equipment, the Grand Forks fire chief said it isn’t a case of unloading items to the department’s brothers to the west.

The water tender is in perfect working condition, Heriot said, and the same for the breathing equipment.

“All our self-contained breathing apparatuses (SCBA) we use here are ISI (brand) and the ones we have now that we’re going to sell to the Midway are the old Magnum model. We’ve changed to a model called Viking and there are some notable differences and we originally had kept the Magnums because we were going to use them specifically for training so the guys didn’t beat up the new ones but because there are so many differences we’d rather have our guys training with the ones they’re going to use,” said Heriot. “These ones have just become expendable. They’re fine and Walt still uses Magnums there.”

For his part, Osellame said the new equipment will help his department’s efficiency and it is all part of co-operation between the various area firefighters.

“Our intent here is hopefully to be able to extend our response out towards Rock Creek on Highway 3 and 33 and we’ve already received an engine donated by the Regional District of Kootenay Boundary, which is the old Greenwood engine, and it still works wonderfully,” said the Midway fire chief.

“We have a mutual aid agreement between Greenwood, Grand Forks and even to an extent Christina Lake but it doesn’t end there … we all try to help each other with everything we can, so I’m going to go over and do a bunch of training, assessments and that kind of thing for them and they’re going to help us out with anything else they can do, whether it’s live fire training or helping us out with some equipment so we can get some things done,” Osellame went on to say.

Heriot said that he estimates that the Grand Forks department’s new fire tender could be arriving at the end of the month.



Karl Yu

About the Author: Karl Yu

After interning at Vancouver Metro free daily newspaper, I joined Black Press in 2010.
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