Public Safety

Fire Services

n 1973, Vancouver had its worst record of deaths due
to fire—forty people perished in blazes throughout
the major city of British Columbia. The province was
only then starting to come to grips with more formal
and standardized training of its 7,000 professional and

volunteer fire fighters. That year, the Volunteer Fire Fighters’ Asso-
ciation of B.C. was officially formed, while a group of fourteen fire offi-
cials—who'd met in Burnaby to coordinate training throughout the Lower
Mainland—decided they should create a province-wide body of profes-
sionals, the B.C. Fire Training Officers’ Association. Among those attending
its inaugural meeting was Bud Kellett, Vancouver’s Chief Fire Training
Officer. Five years later, he became the founding Director of what was origi-
nally called the Fire Services Academy at the just-born Justice Institute—“to
provide fire fighters with a cost-effective channel for both individual and
departmental goal achievement”

The key client was the Attorney General’s Office of the Fire Commis-
sioner. The re-christened Fire Academy, in its second year of operation, had
2,242 student training days, nearly a 170-percent leap in programming for
paid and volunteer fire fighters. It also introduced regional weekend semi-
nars for volunteers around the province, a popular innovation that became
a training mainstay. By 1980, Kellett had been working with three Program
Directors to supervise learning: Tony Evans (volunteers), Dr. Larry Fagan
(management) and Paul Smith (recruits).

With this foundation built by a small group of pioneers three decades
ago, what is today the Fire and Safety Division has become an organization
of two-dozen full-time staff commanding the expertise of more than 150
instructors at two campuses, in New Westminster and Maple Ridge. The

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