Under-equipped fire station a danger in Ste. Anne, Senneville

A 2,000-gallon capacity water tanker that is supposed to be at the beck and call of firefighters at Ste. Anne de Bellevue's fire station to help them out with hazardous situations in that town and neighbouring Senneville has instead been parked in a Montreal storehouse for the last year and a half.

"I want to know why we don't have a tanker," Ste. Anne Mayor Bill Tierney asked at the last Montreal agglomeration council meeting.

According to Tierney, two large tankers have been sitting in a garage in Ile Bizard/Ste. Geneviève borough for the last little while. St. Anne de Bellevue used to have a 1,000-gallon tanker and another 750-gallon vehicle until mergers at the end of 2001 united fire-fighting services island-wide. The West Island municipality now only has a smaller, 500-gallon water tanker and a truck with a ladder.

The Chronicle visited the fire station on Boulevard des Anciens Combattants, where a big, empty space could indeed be seen in its garage in the middle of the two above-mentioned vehicles.

The situation is one that bothers Senneville Mayor George McLeish as well, since the team at Ste. Anne is responsible for the safety of citizens in his village too. "This is not a new problem. This is a problem that has existed since the merger actually, since 2002," he said.

"At the time we had tankers," he added. "We had two of them and they had at least sufficient capacity that they could put out a fire."

Several homes in Senneville are not tied to any aqueduct system whatsoever, relying on septic tanks. A map of the Island of Montreal in the St. Anne de Bellevue fire station highlights them as house addresses 163 to 283 on Senneville Road.

Lachine borough mayor Claude Dauphin, who is also in charge of public safety and security for Montreal's executive committee, said the situation should be rectified by the end of the year.

"We'll make sure that they get (the tanker) this year in 2009 with trained firefighters," Dauphin said, adding the tanker would require training five firefighters to use it properly.

He did not know whether this would mean hiring new firefighters or transferring them from other stations on the island.

Though he did not deny the tanker was purchased by the end of 2007, Dauphin said there had been no delays in sending it along to the fire station, stating quite the opposite. "In (Montreal's) scheme, it was supposed to be a couple of years from now that they would have a new water tank truck," he said, but added concern for the safety of citizens has made the executive committee move up the tanker's availability to 2009.

That is not good enough for some Senneville residents, who have taken measures into their own hands by having hydrants installed. "The previous owner had this fire hydrant installed already," explained Gilles Bernaquez, a caretaker for an estate among the many on Senneville Road untied to a sewage system.

Interviewed on the impeccably trimmed lawns of the property, he pointed to the green-coloured fire hydrant, explaining it is linked to a large swimming pool within the home. "What (the new owner did) is widen the diameter of the hydrant's valve to accommodate the firefighters' new equipment," he said.

"It's a pretty big swimming pool," Bernaquez said. In the event of a fire, he added, the water pumped from there should at least be enough to disperse a large blaze until reinforcements could come through, if not put it out completely.

The property, like many in Senneville, is near the Lake of Two Mountains, but Bernaquez said frozen water in the winter and low levels in the summer due to evaporation would make it inefficient for firefighters to use.

In December, a blaze in Ile Bizard/Ste. Geneviève ravaged a multi-million-dollar mansion on Bord du Lac Street. Firefighters at the time had to break into the frozen waters of Rivière des Prairies to fetch water, since the neighbourhood was also untied to any aqueduct, and no large tanker was available. The home was destroyed completely.

Montreal officials did not comment on whether the tanker reserved for Ile Bizard/Ste. Geneviève's station was only moved there after that incident.