Fire Ops 101 & the Inglewood Fire Station

Last month, I had the opportunity to join Mayor Gondek and a record number of my Council colleagues for Fire Ops 101, wherein we spent the day in a pretty immersive simulation of what a shift entails for a City of Calgary firefighter. There was a fire alarm where we entered a burning building in a frenetic but organized search for people to save in the pitch-black smoke before attacking and dousing the fire itself - awkward, claustrophobic, physically demanding, desperate, and obviously juxtaposed - within the super-controlled circumstances of the training centre - with the very real danger of a real-life burning building.

But there was much more to the shift: the critical work of extricating people from the tangled metal of an automobile crash before the paramedics could even begin to do their life-saving work; there was also the desperate work of trying to keep a person suffering from an overdose alive - in the simulation, after their heart stopped and despite 15 minutes of CPR, the paramedics arrived and pronounced them dead; it fell to us to inform and console their family member. And this was just a sampling from the broad menu of fraught emergencies firefighters respond to every shift they work, every day, day in, day out, across our city. It can sound trite or hollow to pull out the term heroes, but it’s impossible not to go there when you’re confronted with the crush of emotionally, physically, and mental health taxing situations they face every day.

It was with a much more theoretical grasp of this reality fifteen years ago that I was representing Inglewood as the president of our community association and we pivoted in our planning for the lots behind the Festival Hall. In 2007 we knew that Inglewood needed a much larger population to sustain ourselves and to provoke the City to invest in infrastructure like the SE LRT. We had accordingly, and through extensive engagement of the community, identified that half-block at the corner of 11 and 11 as suitable for significant residential densities over (we hoped) a mixed-use, retail podium. But the Fire Department approached us and explained that after an extensive search they’d identified those lots as the perfect location from which to enact their new deployment strategy: entering the downtown quickly from this and other points of the compass; and, able to serve the East Calgary communities in which they were embedding.

While we knew we wanted more residential density in that location, we also knew that hosting a fire station was an essential ingredient of the complete community we aspired to become (once again). And so we acquiesced and welcomed the Fire Department in as our future neighbours. Over the next couple years, it dawned on us that if we had our cake and ate it too - if we had a fire station built into the mixed-use residential building we had first envisioned on that sight, that Inglewood would achieve a leading best practice. And while that kind of thinking was maybe too ahead of its time in 2010, a policy environment at the City of Calgary that embraced such thinking was a core component of the Great Neighbourhoods platform that got me elected as the award 9 City Councillor.

I’m fiercely proud that we are now about to break ground on that fire station embedded in a mixed use building, across the street from a fully funded future GreenLine Station, surrounded by streets about to receive a generational overhaul to include active modes and the festival requirements of the Night Market. I want to thank everyone who has shared this vision and helped achieve these outcomes. And I want to assure everyone who doesn’t share this vision or this history, that this is a very good thing that’s been a long time coming. Most importantly though, I look forward to welcoming City of Calgary firefighters as part of Inglewood’s growing population.