City of Vancouver
I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your presentations to our Battalion Chief and Execute Staff group. While this Department is in the process of updating our High Rise response protocols, your presentations have been very timely. The feed back from those presentations has been extremely positive.
The Department shares many of the concerns that other major cities express to us, how to keep up with the technology both at awareness level and a practical level. The awareness level is taken care of to a degree through the submission of plans to our Fire Prevention Branch and the Planning Department’s permit process. The bigger challenge to this Department is how to recognize many of the specific hazards contained in modern structures, purpose built, that we are tasked with protecting daily. Very specific, relatively unique needs of owners or long term tenants have spawned some very challenging but necessary structures.
Technology introduces new and highly technical infrastructure that the Fire Service is tasked to protect which truly stresses our resources. Your disaster plan document addresses these challenges in a refreshing way. Most documents are too detailed to be of much use at the scene. If the information is not already memorized, the cumbersome nature of extracting it from reams of text render if of little use. Your document, while not intended to provide by-law data as other do, provides exactly what information is required of the safe handling of an emergency scene with little knowledge of the structure prior to the event. It is the quick access to accurate, at a glance, infrastructure information that makes your document stand out.
While none of the information contained in your lecture was foreign to us, your grasp of what matters to the fire service and organized presentation put a lot of pertinent information out in a short time. The feedback has all been good; some of our Fire Prevention Officers have been asking some good questions based on your presentation. One reoccurring comment is regarding why our own documents don’t use graphics more in keeping with yours.
I am not aware of any other document that captures the information I would be looking for in an emergency as well as yours does. I have no hesitation in recommending your system to anyone desiring an emergency disaster plan specific to their building.
