It was a busy year for both the Winkler and Morden fire departments in 2023.
Winkler only had two more calls than in 2022, but it was enough to set a new record, while Morden came up just shy of their highest call volume.
“It’s growing just because we’re a growing community,” said Winkler Chief Richard Paetzold.
“We initially thought the year before may have been an anomaly because we were slowly creeping up to the 200 mark, and all of a sudden last year we made a significant jump,” he said. “All of a sudden, in the fall, it started to pick up and didn’t let off until the end of the year.”
There were 222 calls in 2023 compared to 220 a year earlier, and 160 were in Winkler—a four per cent increase—while 59 were in the RM of Stanley—a four per cent decrease. The department also responded to three mutual aid calls.
Fires represent a majority of their calls at 32 per cent, while false alarms and vehicle accidents both came in at 27 per cent.
“There wasn’t really anything significantly different,” noted Paetzold. “The false alarms seems high, but that’s pretty typical … compared to other communities around us, it’s lower than some.”
He explained there are places like care facilities which have required alarm systems that are monitored, but there are others that are voluntary, such as what you would find in residential homes. They are supposed to contact the owner first, but no response then puts through a call to emergency services within 45 seconds.
“That’s how it’s supposed to work. It can cut out a lot of false alarms … we work hard on trying to educate some places on that,” said Paetzold, who added people often cannot immediately get through to the alarm company, so he advises them to leave their phone line clear and wait for the call so they can let them know emergency responders are not needed.
“Some of these security systems are a little finicky. We’ve had a few instances as well where it’s actually a burglar alarm and for some reason it dispatched us.”
The biggest call for them in the past year was the fire that destroyed Janzen’s Paint and Decorating.
“That one had lots of challenges with the weather we had. It was extremely cold … and there were some water supply issues. We called in mutual aid for that as well,” Paetzold recalled.
“What we learned this year was a lot of the tactics and the water conservation methods we’ve employed over the years, trying to get better at fighting rural fires, was helpful,” he added.
Another message he wanted to get out was the importance of renters having content insurance in case of a fire.
“We find so many instances where people do not have content insurance … the building owner gets his repairs done … but the renter is left on the hook for their loss. It’s not worth it to go without.”
In Morden, the range of calls also remained fairly consistent compared to the previous year.
“Our call numbers were close to being a record. We had 148 calls, and our record is 152,” shared Chief Andy Thiessen. “It was up by about 24 calls from last year.
“What’s kind of jumping out at us right now is home alarms are one of our biggest calls right now. Some of them are legitimate like carbon monoxide calls or someone cooking on the stove,” he said. “A large majority of them are system failures like a bad detector, or they fail to change their batteries or didn’t realize they have batteries.
“There’s a need for a bit of education there. A lot of them are direct dialing monitoring systems now,” he said, echoing Paetzold. “We get there, and they say, sorry, we tried to call our monitoring company. If they don’t get to the phone in time to call us off, we’re coming.”
Otherwise, the calls for 2023 were very much par for the course.
“We had a couple structure fires. We lost one home on Elmwood,” said Thiessen. “We’ve had a couple kitchen fires that we were able to get at quickly, so there was minimal damage.”
They also responded to numerous motor vehicle accidents, although none were too serious.
“And grass fire season wasn’t that bad either. We had a few of them but nothing crazy there either,” said Thiessen. “The Christmas season was awesome. It was the best Christmas I could have wished for because we had zero calls between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day.”
