Lethbridge Fire and Blood Tribe Fire team up for joint training day

Joint training between Lethbridge Fire and Emergency Services and the Blood Tribe Emergency Services took place on Thursday. It was a chance for the members of the Blood Tribe to utilize the Lethbridge training group and facility.

“In times of need sometimes we do have to bring in outside agencies to help with fire. So it’s great that everyone’s on the same page as far as training, and anytime we can get together and do training as a team, it works well. If another agency does come in and they’re maybe not on the same page, then things can go awry. If everyone is on the same page, though, then they can be utilized as basically our own staff.” 

This was the first year this collaborative training took place, and the hope is to have more training days like this in the future.   

“Chief Borland was saying, we want to make this an annual training event for our professional development, strategic planning, those types of things. We want to get better to serve the Blood Tribe members and then off reserve as well. We do branch off at times with our ambulance and like Wes Borland was saying there, with our mutual aid agreements on the fire, whether it’s on reserve or off reserve, as everybody knows, we’ve had some big fires out on Blood Tribe where we want to build those partnerships to make sure that we are engaged with our mutual aid partners so that we can fight better fires and protect property and people and the environment as the best that we can”

The Blood Tribe runs four full-time Fire and Emergency Services with the main station in Standoff.