A growing town means busier firefighters and EMS

The Niverville Fire Chief says July has been the busiest month of the year for their firefighters and EMS team.  

Keith Bueckert says, so far, they’ve had 38 calls while in January 2022, they had 36.  

“We sort of beat that record in July, so I tip my hat to all of our members. With it being summer and folks on holidays and all that, our resources were a little bit stretched with some of our manpower at times. But we were able to handle it and it just shows the great team that we have here in town.” 

Bueckert says to date they have responded to 211 calls for service in 2022, though not all have been for the town of Niverville. 

“We're one of about 16 communities in the province that have First Responder programs still operating, so our call volumes are split between medical and fire calls for the town and surrounding area. That said, we just cover Niverville for fire calls, but we do go outside of our boundaries when providing medical first response.” 

Giving a breakdown of where the volunteers were called to, Bueckert says, “We had a couple of calls in July where we assisted our neighbours by sending our water tanker to their fires and then we had some medical calls, alarm calls and service calls within town that we responded to.” 

Bueckert says the Niverville Fire and EMS volunteers are expecting their total calls for 2022 to eclipse last year's totals, to which he says, “I would like to see it slow down a bit just for the benefit of our team. You know, when you get moving to this type of call volume, we have employers in town that allow our guys to leave during the day and the family support that our members receive from their families to allow them to do this. I know it's not always the perfect timing, but it is pretty special that they give up their time so that they can go and help their community.” 

When asked what the residents of Niverville could do to help bring down the number of calls, Bueckert believes it really boils down to the growth of the town. “I don't think there's one thing that anyone can do, but it's just one of those things that people know that if something does happen, our members are there and ready to help in any way that they can.” 

Fire Chief Keith Bueckert inside the Niverville Fire Hall