The regional district’s emergency fire dispatch service moved to Kelowna under contract with the City of Kelowna Fire Department in January of this year.
As part of the new service contract, calls are now being tracked in order to analyze for types of calls, trends, volume of calls and geographic location.
Statistics for the past two years (2010 to 2011) indicate a decline in calls for the fire departments of Kaleden and Kerermeos, based on per centages of the total number of calls received in Kelowna by regional district fire departments.
Okanagan Falls Volunteer Fire Department’s calls also dipped slightly.
Keremeos (2010) 2.7 per cent of total call volume.
(2011) 2.3 per cent of total call volume
Kaleden (2010) 2.4 per cent of total call volume.
(2011) 1.7 per cent of total call volume
Okanagan Falls (2010) 5.1 per cent of total call volume.
(2011) 4.4 per cent of total call volume.
Interestingly, regional fire departments call outs for structure fires have only made up 2.3 per cent of total calls to dispatch so far in 2012. Medical assist calls have made up 57.8 per cent of total call volumes this year.