Corporate Sponsorship has Huge Impact for Minburn County Fire Departments

Michelle Pinon News Advertiser

Minburn County Regional Director of Protective Services Mike Fundytus says corporate sponsorship has had a huge impact on operations this past year.

“The corporate sponsorship has a huge impact on operations as it offsets the cost of equipment which allows us to focus budget money on recruitment and retention of volunteers and training for our volunteers.”

Enbridge donated $7,500 for the purchase of an ultra-high pressure wildland firefighting skid unit. Fundytus says the wildland skid unit goes in the back of the county command unit. It enables a faster response time as typically I am available to respond directly with it rather than having to respond to a fire hall and jump into one of our traditional fire apparatus.” The county also paid for a Mavic Enterprise Dual Drone. Fundytus says, “The drone is equipped with a 4K high-resolution camera as well as a thermal camera. The drone will have a variety of uses with the integrated thermal camera.”

For example, “In large wildland fires, it will allow us to quickly get an idea on the size of the fire, direction of the fire, people or property threatened by the fire. It will allow incident commanders to make quicker decisions with real-time information on where to best deploy our resources to extinguish the fire faster. We can pinpoint hot spots more efficiently. It can be utilized in Search and Rescue operations for patient location as our closest Search and Rescue teams are based out of Edmonton or St Paul,” explains Fundytus. ATCO also made a substantial donation to the Innisfree Fire Department to pay for new turnout gear. The $5,000 donation allowed for all of the firefighters to have new gear. “As per National Fire Protection Association, (NFPA) standards turnout gear has a 10-year life span. We had multiple sets in Innisfree and Mannville that were past there service life, we implemented a 5-year replacement plan with the Innisfree and Mannville departments with the support from ATCO we were able to accelerate the Innisfree replacement program to 3 years and now the whole department is in NFPA certified gear.” Fundytus went on to say, “Innisfree Fire had multiple tools and equipment mainly their hydraulic extrication tools (Cutter, Spreader, and Ram) stolen around December 26, 2019, from their fire hall. We replaced these with more modern electric extrication tools in January the cost to replace these tools was approximately $35,000.00. Insurance covered approximately $31,000.00 for the stolen extrication tools.” In addition to corporate sponsorship, Fundytus wanted to personally thank all of the volunteers from Vegreville, Mannville, and Innisfree for their service in protecting the residents and visitors of Minburn County.