Glenn Higgins – Emergency Services

What made you decide to get into emergency services?

My brother-in-law was a firefighter, full career firefighter in Orillia and encouraged me to become a volunteer. It was a perfect opportunity for me to be able to apply, so I applied, I became a volunteer and a career full-time placement came up after about two and a half years, and I was successful in completing and securing a position and that was about 25 years ago now.

I see, so for a town of its size, is Orillia kind of slow in terms of emergencies, or do we have more than people realize?

Orillia is a busy little town. We do about 2,800 calls a year between the two stations and we respond to multiple calls. We do fire calls of course because we’re fire department, but we also do ice water rescue calls, or water calls in the summer. We also do hazmat medical assist calls as well as pretty much any other emergency spills in ditches or anything like that.

If you call 9-1-1 we actually answer the calls in Orillia, which is unusual. Most fire departments do not answer 9-1-1 calls, they go to a different centre.

What is the most common type of call that your department gets?

The most common call is, we’re running a little over 50 percent for medical calls. We run a lot of medical calls. Then of course all the medical that you would respond to, like a motor vehicle collision or fire.

What’s the oddest call your fire department has received?

We have an unusual, kind of a funny story. When we got our defibrillators, we’d done a defibrillation call on somebody and was able to shock them and get their heart rate back, and into the hospital. Then 10 years later, I responded and it was the same guy, and it was somebody I had worked with in my previous career, so that was kind of a weird thing to have 10 years apart. And two saves too, he lived the second time.