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GREG LAYCHAK/ OBSERVER
Alan Pryor has had many roles at the Agassiz Fire Department during his 45 years of service. The 61-year-old Agassiz native still fights fires and drives trucks for the crew.
AFD: Fighting fires for 70 years
LEGION
Greg Laychak
Students given lesson in
THE OBSERVER
“Over the past 25 years that I have been with the Agassiz Fire Department (AFD) we have seen many changes in the fire service in British Columbia, including the type of vehicles, equipment and changes to the training standard throughout British Columbia and Canada. With the AFD, training has always been our number one priority, because it will be training that will carry a firefighter through all of the situations that we respond to—to keep ourselves safe, rescue people when needed and to protect property. The most important part of our job is to have all of our emergency responders return safely back to their halls and to their families.”
Fighting fires has always been nasty business, legion history. but Fern and Earl Dyer remember a time when it was even more challenging. Back in the fall of ‘45 when Fern was on his first fire, the water supply was pulled by a team of horses, there were no uniforms or was discharged from the Crash claims local man . 3 head gear, and rescuers like military in Manitoba the himself would be tethered Elementary upgrade . . . 3 next year he moved to join to a rope when they plunged into a blaze looking for his family, and naturally fell Opinion . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 in beside sibling Fern at the missing residents. department. Th e Agassiz fi re (before Chicken) with thewere R in16front of and Mail Can Bag you . . . .add . . . the . . . word . 7 Chubby “We and 22 department had just been you went to help,” says Fern chicken (not after chicken). And go ahead. formed thatthen year,we andcan Fern Britco milestone . . . . . 13 was there from nearly the in his apartment across the hall from brother Earl’s. “It beginning. Classieds . . . . . . . . . 14 When his brother Earl wasn't a matter of belonging
INSIDE
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- Wayne Dyer, Fire Chief to the fire department, you just went to help and you stayed with it, that's all.” The two of them worked completely on a volunteer basis and “whatever salary there was, you took it at Christmas time and you could probably have bought a case of beer with it,” recalls Fern, while the two chuckle.
Equipment upgrades were slow coming in those days, and the Dyers brothers remember the “homemade” vehicles that couldn’t make it up the hill on the road to Harrison Mills until water was emptied from the tank. And their methods reflected the times, remembers 91-year-old
Earl. “We never really put a fire out, we just controlled,” he says. “You'd have to tear [the house] down anyhow so we used to let it burn to the ground level and your cleanup was nothing.” Something that hasn’t changed over the years according to Earl: tragedy. The worst fire he attended was at a meat freezer facility where the owner's son died after they couldn't find him in the structure’s maze of alleys. “The old masks they had in those days were as good as hanging a handkerchief in front of you,” Fern says also recalling that particular Continued on 2
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