City of Merritt and Logan Lake partnering up for fire prevention

MERRITT – When it comes to fire protection, the City of Merritt and the District of Logan Lake have agreed to help each other out.

“It’s a mutual aid agreement and it’s really designed around us providing services when they are needing extra resources and vice versa,” said Dave Tomkinson, Merritt Fire Chief.

The agreement runs on the basis of when Merritt or Logan Lake needs a hand with a fire, whether it be equipment or man power, the other will come to there aid.

“If either municipality has a emergency and they allocate, or are going to allocate, all their emergency resources then they can make the request and then we will send out, typically its a one fire engine type thing with a crew, to go and assist and then of course the converse of that is true.”

Chief Tomkinson is excited to have this five year agreement back in place with Logan Lake as he said the past contract was up.

“We’ve had mutual aid agreements for several years. This one had lapsed but we are happy to have it back and know that we have the added resources if we have a large scale incident in our own community.”

When it comes to the rate and the deal of the services provided, Tomkinson said it falls in line with another provincial agreement.

“In this case, the rates that are going to be paid are aligned with the Interagency Agreement, which is provincial rate that is set out that we use when we are on provincial deployments so there is the same rates that we are going to use.”

City Council voted unanimously to approve of this deal at the June 28 meeting.