What can $180,000 buy you these days? Well, for Prince George, that’s enough to secure your very own structure protection unit to assist in the battle of local wildfires.
Miracle Theatre achieved that fundraising goal through its A Comedy of Tenors production from earlier this year and unveiled the unit at Fire Hall 1 today (Monday).
Director, Ted Price told MyPGNow.com conversations with the city began roughly 18 months ago and given the recent wildfire seasons, a home-based unit such as this was badly needed.
“We really haven’t had to deal with anything. But, our time is going to come, we really feel that and when we discovered that Prince George didn’t have any wildfire equipment, we thought maybe we could do something about that.”
Price believes the acquisition of a second such unit isn’t too far behind and for good reason.
“Our city has the second-biggest footprint of any municipality in BC, Abbotsford is first and then us. We are surrounded by forests and to have a second unit to make us that much stronger is all to the good.”
Manager of Emergency Preparedness, Tanya Spooner stated while a number of these units are located in PG, the majority of them get deployed to other communities often leaving us more thinly resourced.
“Those regularly get deployed during the year and so, quite often it would be that all of the structure protection units were off to a large and we didn’t have anything in our community if we needed it.”
The unit, which will be called “Miracle” consists of pumps, water tanks, hoses and sprinkler systems.
Prince George Mayor Simon Yu along with councillors Ron Polillo, Susan Scott, Kyle Sampson and Trudy Klassen were in attendance along with Fire Chief Cliff Warner and Miracle Theatre staff.
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