// MUSKOKA LIVING //
Above and Beyond:
Volunteer Firefighters Protect Cottage Country BY MATT DRISCOLL PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF THE GRAVENHURST FIRE DEPARTMENT
In Muskoka, the region’s fire departments are staffed primarily by volunteer firefighters who put their jobs, their families and their entire lives on hold when the call comes in.
F
irefighters the world over are driven by a desire to better their community and provide assistance when people are at their most vulnerable. That same mentality is as true for firefighters in urban areas as it is for those in rural communities. The primary difference between the two is how they accomplish those tasks.
“Everyone is here for the right reason,” says volunteer firefighter Don Giroux. “Many times we’re the only people standing between someone and something that could cause them a great deal of harm.” Giroux is more familiar than most with Muskoka’s volunteer firefighter departments. He spent several years working with the Seguin Fire Department (which incorporates a large geographic area between the village of Rosseau and the town of Parry Sound) before joining the Bracebridge Fire Department in 2016. Giroux traces his desire to be a firefighter to an early age and a distinct memory. 58
“I remember waking up when I was young and all the alarms were going off in our house,” says Giroux. “My parents got us outside and I remember seeing the firefighters coming out later through the steam and the smoke. To me they looked like a group of blue-collar astronauts.” Giroux spent 15 years as a reservist in the Canadian Armed Forces but he also decided to focus his efforts on helping in his home community. “There are many ways to help out in the community and I think that volunteering in any capacity is a worthwhile endeavor - whether that’s working at a food bank or whatever it might be,” he says. “I’m a doer and I’ve always liked to act. When we had our last big flood [in 2019] I wanted to be in there, filling sandbags and doing what I could.” Although both Seguin and Bracebridge are volunteer departments, Giroux says the municipalities encounter very different challenges. Primary among those is the fact that Seguin does not have pressurized fire hydrants, while the urban area of Bracebridge does.
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