Weather has both been a friend and foe of the Okotoks Fire Department through the first three months of 2016.

The Fire Department presented their first quarter results to Town Council on Monday and numbers are down when it comes to calls so far.

Deputy Fire Chief Dwight Seymour says the department barely broke 200 calls from January to March.

"We went to 219 incidents which is down a little bit from out first quarter last year," he says. "In 2015 we were at 258 calls so we are down approximately 39 calls from where we were at last year."

Where calls are down in what is usually a busy time for the department it has lead to more training hours for all members.

"In our training we did a total of 453 hours by the community fire fighters and 126 hours by our full time fire fighters," Seymour says. "So that's 453 by our community fire fighters that are unpaid hours that they've volunteered their time for."

To summarize the start of 2016 for fire services, Seymour says the dry weather played a very integral role both positively and negatively.

"January to February with the nice weather we saw a decrease in motor vehicle accidents and responses that we'd normally have with the bad and cold weather so the weather helped us in the first couple of months and then as we've seen the end of the first quarter into March and now into April the dry weather is continuing and the grassfires are keeping us busy."

Currently into the second quarter the continual dry weather has lead to the Town of Okotoks placing a fire advisory which remains in effect as of Tuesday afternoon.

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