MUSKOKA LIVING Above and Beyond: Volunteer Firefighters Protect Cottage Country

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.

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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. “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.

The emergencies encountered by Muskoka’s volunteer firefighters run the gamut and are quite different than those experienced in urban areas.

To compensate, the department in Seguin and many other rural parts of Muskoka including the non-urban area of Bracebridge, must gather water from nearby ponds and lakes using tanker shuttles. The water is then brought to the site and stored in pools for the pumper trucks to use to put out the blazes.

In the winter, when the lakes and ponds are frozen over, these rural departments use dry hydrants to combat fires. Dry hydrants run deep into the earth to extract source groundwater.

The Bracebridge Fire Department has approximately 50 fighters responding out of two fire halls. Although the department does have three full-time staff, the remainder of the firefighters respond from work or home via pagers.

Drew says a key thing to remember for those going to cottages in the area is that they need to treat their seasonal residences with the same respect they would their permanent residences in terms of fire safety.

“A lot of the time people arrive here and switch to vacation mode but you need to ensure that you have working smoke and CO2 alarms - it ’s the law,” he says.

West of Bracebridge, the Muskoka Lakes Fire Department watches over a broad geographic area and many small communities.

Dan McPhedran lives in Bala but works out of the Glen Orchard Station - one of 10 stations in the municipality.

“I spent all my summers up here and I had heard great things about the fire department,” says the Toronto native. “It ’s a great station and a great department. ”

Fighting fires is just a small percentage of the calls that Muskoka’s volunteer departments encounter. Ice rescues, medical calls to

All of Muskoka’s municipal fire departments are staffed primarily by volunteers.

island cottages and attending car accidents are all par for the course. “Yesterday we had an injured hiker on the Hardy Lake Trails [just south of Bala] and we had to hike about a kilometre and a half into the bush to help her,” he says. “I feel like people are really grateful to have us around because they understand we’re all volunteers.”

Another significant difference between volunteer and full-time departments is the use of the green flashing light to indicate the volunteer firefighters are on their way to the station.

“It isn’t technically illegal not to pull over but it only takes two seconds and it could make a huge difference,” he says.

Both men say the bonds between fellow firefighters, and between the department and the community, are one of the main reasons they love what they do. Residents of Muskoka can rest assured that when they need them most, these volunteer firefighters will be there to answer the call.