The past week has been a busy one for the Okotoks Fire Department who has responded to 24 calls in the week after the long weekend.

Fire Chief Ken Thevenot says they had a great range of calls but there wasn't much out of the ordinary.

"In the last week, we at the Okotoks Fire Services, responded to 24 calls.  We had 14 medical related calls, 6 alarm system activation's, 2 motor vehicle collisions and one grass fire."

Thevenot says the grass fire was a little out of the normal range of what the OFD responds to on average.

"The grass fire was caused by problem with a transformer and a downed power line." Thevenot adds, although we've received moisture the grass is still dry in certain areas. "The rain has helped a bit, you can see out there that the grass isn't as bad as it was a month ago. It's starting to green up now, so just because in that area where the grass fire was there was a bit of wind and it was slightly dry, that's why it started up."

Fire Chief Thevenot says when he looks at the stats, he's seeing a mild jump in the number of calls that the department has been responding to since 2016.

"Compared to this time last year, in 2016 we're up 18 calls which is about a 5% increase. Right now for 2017 we're at 425 calls, while last year at this time we were 407."

Cause for the increase in numbers can be attributed to population growth or certain weather events throughout the year like the amount of snow on the roads we saw this winter compared to last.

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