The Niverville Fire Department responded to a record 214 calls in 2017.

Fire Chief Keith Bueckert says 55 of those were fire calls and 159 of them were for medical first response. He says in 2016 they responded to 208 calls, 71 of which were fire-related while 137 were for medical first response. He notes the rise in call volume can be attributed to a growing population.

“Our population is getting bigger and we have more people calling for medical calls. We opened up our new four-story life lease, and we have our personal care home and our assisted living in town that we get a fair amount of calls to.”

Bueckert says at the beginning of 2017 the Hanover Fire Department took over all calls for the rural area surrounding Niverville but that hasn’t had much of an effect.

“We no longer cover the RM of Hanover. Our call volume didn’t feel the impact of them taking the area back. We had 55 calls this past year for fire calls and we had 71 the year before but generally speaking, we were only going into Hanover maybe 10 times a year so that didn’t affect us.”

Bueckert says the Niverville Fire Department has a full staff with lots of amazing and committed firefighters. He says this year there were not as many larger fires in Niverville which is a good thing.

“We only had a handful of structure fires in 2017 compared to 2016 where we had quite a few structure fires in Niverville so it was quite a bit quieter which is a good thing for lost value. The biggest fire we had was on Main Street where we lost the shop right next to Chicken Chef, that building burnt.”