Apex Volunteer Fire Rescue (AVFR) has achieved fire insurance rating, which means more protection and possibly lower insurance rates for the rural community.
Housing protection level 3A has been achieved for personal insurance and public fire protection classification 7 for business insurance.
“Achieving a fire insurance rating of ‘Protected’ is an important milestone that recognizes the hard work of our dedicated volunteers and community members who support us in providing 24-hour fire protection services. 24, 7 days a week,” said Kelly Johnston, head of Apex Volunteer Fire Rescue, in the press release.
“This not only increases public safety for the Apex community, but provides peace of mind and economic viability for residents, businesses and homeowners through more affordable insurance.”
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Apex Mountain Resort general manager James Shalman added that for many residents and businesses it was difficult to get insurance because the community is about 10 kilometers from the Penticton Fire Department.
“In fact, getting this extra rating means that many homes, condos, townhouses, cottages that had trouble getting insurance, had no insurance, or had to pay very high premiums… (will now) be in able to have lower premiums or even get insurance at all. So this is great news for the community,” Shalman said.
According to Fire Underwriters Survey, a service for insurers and municipalities, in past reviews, staffing levels have prevented AVFR from earning fire insurance rankings.
However, there are now 16 trained firefighters, including the fire chief, who live and work in the community.
“Community support for volunteer firefighters was quite high, but now that it has reached the next level of status, that involvement has actually increased even more because people are even more willing to get involved,” said Shaman.
“They saw what happened this summer, they liked what happened and they want to show their support. An effort to mitigate any fires that may occur in the future.
This achievement comes nearly a year after firefighters transitioned to a Regional District of Okanagan-Similkameen (RDOS) fire department.
“Before, it was completely volunteer-based and all the money that was raised was from fundraising,” said Apex Volunteer Fire Rescue prevention officer Molly Raine.
“Now that we have moved on to [Regional District]Apex Volunteer Fire Rescue has a dedicated team that responds 24/7 to help the Apex Resort community.
According to RDOS, the volunteers have spent the last year training to become proficient in exterior and interior attack structural firefighting, vehicle extrication, medical first responder, rope rescue, fire suppression, forest fires, protection of structures against forest fires and fire prevention.
The AVFR team has also spent time improving the operational readiness of fire apparatus and equipment to industry standards for frontline emergency response.
“Now that we’re a tax-funded fire department, there are certain training requirements that every firefighter must meet,” Raine said.
“We meet the first and third Tuesday of every month to complete the training to make sure we have a well-balanced group.”
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Those skills were put to the test over the summer when the Keremeos Creek Wildfire quickly grew near the mountain.
“We learned a lot, we were actually amazingly prepared,” Shalman said.
“It was interesting – in some of the debriefings with some of the fire departments and chiefs, they said the Apex Mountain Resort community was the most secure community they had ever seen.”
In the future, work is underway to improve the fire rescue base.
“Right now our deputy chief is working very hard on completing our new fire station,” Raine said.
“We will also have a new fire truck coming to replace our fire truck, Timber, before 2025.”
Apex Mountain Resort says that although fire is not a priority during the winter, it is still important to be ready for fire.
“It’s kind of hard to think about the fires right now when we have such great snow conditions here and the snow is fantastic here, but it’s always on your mind because people have a lot of fires to stay at. hot in their residence,” Shalman said.
“Always make sure your chimney is swept, that you have everything prepared at the start of the season so that when we enter winter conditions, everything remains safe throughout the winter.
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