City of Surrey's Annual Financial Report 2020

CITY OF SURREY OVERVIEWS FIRE DEPARTMENT

The Surrey Fire Service’s mission is to protect life, property and the environment by responding to emergencies, ensuring regulatory compliance and developing community education. Surrey Fire Service helps to make our City a safe place to live.

SURREY EMERGENCY PROGRAM Surrey’s Emergency Program includes Neighbourhood Emergency Preparedness Program (NEPP); Business Emergency Preparedness Program (BEPP); Surrey Emergency Program Amateur Radio (SEPAR); Surrey Search and Rescue (SSAR); and Emergency Social Services (ESS), Level One: Personal Disaster Assistance. Through these programs, City staff and the large network of volunteers provide valuable community emergency services. EMERGENCY COMMUNICATIONS Communications provide emergency dispatch services to 41 different communities across BC including computer-aided dispatch services and radio support for fire and medical responses. By operating a regional dispatch service, efficiencies are achieved for the benefit of all participants.

OPERATIONS Operations is the largest division and is responsible for emergency medical services, fire suppression, and hazardous materials response and rescue activities. In addition to the above activities handled by the Suppression branch, the Operations Division is also responsible for the Prevention branch and the Training branch. Through these programs, City staff and the large network of volunteers provide valuable community emergency services.

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• The Community Property Safety Team (CPST) treats distressed properties with an immediate focus on unsecured or breached abandoned residential properties by ensuring that property owners maintain their properties in order to reduce the risk of fire, loss of life or injury: 722 properties identified by the CPST since inception, 413 properties demolished as a direct result of the CPST actions and 56 properties re-invested. These continued efforts have decreased fire rates by 85%, from 11.2 abandoned structure fires per 100 structure fires in 2019 to 1.6 abandoned structure fires per 100 structure fires in 2020. • Smoke alarm verifications, comprise of assessing whether the smoke alarm unit was functioning at the time of a residential fire, have increased from 25% in 2006 to 61.6% in 2020. • Inspected 7,549 business properties and provided 6,956 safety educational inspection pamphlets to the business proprietors. This ongoing initiative bolsters the City’s efforts to improve the resiliency of businesses in the event of a disaster or major incidents. • The 2020 residential fire rate of 0.48 fires per 1,000 residential structures has decreased by 78% from 2006.

• The residential fire rate of death/injury per 100,000 residents has decreased by 69% from 2006 from 10.9 casualties per 100,000 residents to 3.4 casualties for 2020. • The Business Emergency Preparedness Program included the delivery of 6,907 targeted disaster recovery educational pamphlets. • Installed 375 smoke alarms and conducted HomeSafe inspections, including the 8,937 smoke alarm initiative responses. • Successfully renewed multi-year contract agreements for legacy Surrey Fire Service Dispatch clients. This milestone marks an extraordinary 100% retention of contracted Dispatch clients. Securing a well-managed in-house Dispatch Services unit strategically allows increased control of quality and costs of service for Surrey and secures multi-year contract revenues on a net positive basis for the City’s operating budget. • In addition to safely completing all planned annual training of Fire staff through the Central Training Facility, two major training client contracts were secured to maximize return on investment in the Central Training Facility.

• Published three research articles and/or papers illustrating the evidence-based decision-making used for strategic planning and emergency activity. Topics included: Cancer Risk for Firefighters, HomeSafe Program Evaluation, and Community Falls and Lift Assists. • Doubled employee engagement to 378 participants in the online medically monitored health portal. Added an online monthly educational component to maintain increased engagement. This tool assists in confidentially enabling members to conveniently manage their individual health portfolios. • Collaboration with Fraser Health, Police and BCEHS continues to support the mitigation of the opioid crisis through real-time overdose tracking and improved resource deployment. • To respond and activate an Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) in a highly impactful disaster, the ongoing Surrey Emergency Program’s Training Initiative leveraged the activation of the Surrey EOC for response to the global pandemic, resulting in added functional training of 73 staff.

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