Firefighter offer turned down

Retired forest technologist says his team was available for hire

A retired forest technologist is calling out the province for not hiring him and a group of his former colleagues to help fight wildfires around Nova Scotia.

And Peter Macisaac is doing it in a big way, with a video about the subject he posted earlier this week on several social media channels garnering a lot of views by Thursday.

“I have 29 years of experience fighting forest fires here in Nova Scotia,” Macisaac says in the video.

“As things progressed last week and buildings were burning and people were being evacuated, I realized that Nova Scotia had a resource of retired technical staff that were experts in fighting fire … So, I called some of these guys up and I put together a crack team.”

‘I GOT FRUSTRATED’

But there’s been no uptake from the Department of Natural Resources and Renewables, which he retired from in 2012.

“Finally, I got frustrated and went on talk radio (last) Thursday and I got a call from Shubie … fire control that they’d put my name on a list and the names of a few others. It was a polite way to say, look, we know you’re making noise. Thank you but no thank you. We’re still not going to hire you guys to come fight fires. So, what taxpayers need to understand is while buildings were burning and the province was shortstaffed, and our government was standing in front of TV cameras saying we’re doing everything we can, they lied to your face. They didn’t. I could have pulled together a lot more teams of retired guys willing to come out and do this.”

In an interview Thursday, Macisaac, 65, said he offered his former employer the services of an experienced sixperson team for a month.

“We weren’t offering to volunteer,” he said. “We were offering to go to work for the department for 30 days for technical wages plus expenses.”

He figures the wages for his team would have cost the province about $37,500.

‘IN THE BACKGROUND’

Macisaac wasn’t offering to be a frontline firefighter.

“We were looking to do non-frontline fire suppression,” he said. “For every person that’s on a firehose, there’s probably three to five people in the background supporting everything that takes place in the incident command system.”

Macisaac said his team could have helped with operations, logistics, planning and finance.

They could have moved vehicles, delivered meals and fuel to the frontline, run firetrucks, helped with evacuations or managed helicopter pads, he said.

“There’s a long extensive (list) of positions all of us were capable of filling,” Macisaac said.

He can’t fathom why his offer of help wasn’t accepted by the province.

“I can’t say that we could have saved houses, but nobody can tell me that we couldn’t have,” Macisaac said.

‘ESTABLISHING A POOL’

A spokeswoman for Natural Resouces didn’t answer questions Thursday about whether Minister Tory Rushton had seen Macisaac’s video.

“DNRR is working on establishing a pool of people who are members of their local fire department, have current wildfire suppression training and can pass a DNRR administered fitness test,” Patricia Jreige, who speaks for the department, said in an email.

“If employed, those volunteers would be compensated as casual hire employees of the provincial government on an as needed basis.”