Okotoks Fire Services kept busy in 2016 but also saw a drop in a few areas.

2015 saw the fire department respond to 1,069 incidents while this past year in 2016 there was a slight drop in activity responding to 995 incidents.

Fire Chief Ken Thevenot says that the decrease in activity doesn't really tell the story of the department's year.

"We did drop down in call volume and call numbers over the year," he says. "We like to think our fire prevention activities and of course the assistance from the public phoning in early notification with cell phones is huge for us when it comes to grass fires or any potential structure fires."

When it comes to training, both their full-time firefighters and volunteers, Thevenot says his staff was hard at working honing their skills for any emergency.

"Our community firefighters consistently every year hit around that 4000 hours of training. It was no different in 2016 we completed 4329 hours of training"

Thevenot did highlight a couple of times, not necessarily certain events, where Fire Services was kept busier than usual. Especially in the first quarter of 2016 where they responded to a majority of their grass fire calls.

"It was dry at the start and we were really concerned about it and then of course what happened provincially with Fort McMurray and we had our fire bans last year. That would be one of our significant events."

In comparison to 2015 and 2016 the fire department responded to the same number of grass fires in 27 different responses.

Also in the 2016 Fire Report Thevenot says they were called out to fewer accidents than in the past.

"We had 20 less vehicle accidents in 2016 so hopefully that's attributed potentially to the less use of cell phones I would hope, from time to time we do have accidents because of that."

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