Cochrane Fire Chief David Humphrey proudly showed off the Cochrane Fire Department's new Incident Management Unit today (September 21) with help from members of the Cochrane Pipeline Operators Committee (CPOC), the group that supplied the money for the new trailer.

Humphrey explained that the CPOC looks for worthy projects in the community and the Cochrane Fire Department were fortunate enough to receive a $16,000 donation from the committee for the purchase of the trailer and set up of the interior.  

"The trailer is basically a portable office designed for incident management  or incident command which is the function at an incident so it's been dubbed an Incident Management Unit," explains Humphrey,

He says the trailer is for unified command so that industry partners and town of Cochrane staff under fire services or emergency management or other agencies that attend mutual aid events when they occur have a workable space so people that are trying to steer the incident have an office space on site that they can work from.  

Humphrey says the trailer is scheduled to go in October 1st to have the remaining electronic equipment installed.  Once it's completed, it will be wi-fi and radio capable for fire department and other industry fire partners within the delivery area for the town of Cochrane.  It also has the capacity to have the radio system expanded as things change into the future, either within the province or in the local area.  That will allow the opportunity to send wi-fi, live time between laptops so that on site people who are working in the emergency management trailer have direct contact with the emergency operations centre.

Humprey says when the unit is completed it will be technology compatible with the rest of Cochrane's emergency managment program.  "It gives us the opportunity to have a site at incidents that we can work from.  We could use that in incidents that are two or three hours long as a place to correlate information or bring together plans or certainly it's designed to sit on site for extended periods of time, up to a number of days to be the coordination centre on large events, should they ever occur.  It gives use the opportunity to have multiple departments or multiple agencies with our municipality together in one working office space to lead the emergency."

Humphrey estimates that, if the unit had been available last year, the Cochrane Fire Department would most likely have used it in 25 to 30 percent of their calls.  "We respond to about 1,000 calls a year," he says. 

Humphrey has been working on getting an Incident Management Unit since he arrived at the Cochrane Fire Department in 2014 and says he is very thankful to CPOC for their donation,  "It's an extremely important piece of equipment and it's a privelege for us to be able to receive it as a donation from the Cochrane Pipeline Operators Committee for our community.  I look forward to having it deployable but I hope I don't ever have to deploy it."