Hanna Mayor Chris Warwick has concerns about the Province’s new climate change strategy, and more importantly how it relates to phasing out coal-powered generation.
    Last Sunday, Premier Rachel Notley, introduced her much anticipated Climate Change Strategy. This shift included emission limits for oil sands, a price on carbon for all Albertans to absorb and a schedule to phase out coal fired electricity generation by 2030.
     Warwick says he understands the days of coal powered generation are numbered, In fact, one of the units at the Sheerness Generating Plant, co-owned by ATCO and Transalta, is scheduled, through federal regulations, to be turn off in 2034, and the second unit shortly thereafter. The new provincial plan moves those timelines up. He feels this is not the right way to make these changes.
    “I appreciate they are addressing the issue but a tax is not the answer,” said Warwick.
    He explains this transition could be done without adding a carbon tax.  He cites a TransAlta report called Dial Down Coal, Dial Up Renewables, which makes the transition without a price on carbon.
    “Who’s going to pay for it? You and me. And why should we?” he asks.
    The Sheerness Generation Station employs about 110 fulltime employees, and almost as many at the mine that supplies it. He said if the plant was converted to burn natural gas, the plant could run on about half the staff.
    While phasing out coal-fired generation will reduce the carbon footprint, Warwick points out it does not address some of the more pressing environmental concerns.
    “The carbon emissions aren’t as harmful themselves as the mercury and the toxins that go along with it. The actual pollution, those are what we should be looking at,” he said.
 While he has concerns, he estimated there could have been changes that are more drastic.
    “I honestly expected worse, I thought the timeline would be shorter than she said to shut down the coal fire generation stations," he said. “It wasn’t as bad, my biggest problem is taxing people, and it is not the industry, that is being taxed it’s everyone of us.”
    “We knew it was coming eventually, we are not naive to think it is here forever, but to fast-track it by another four years, when the feds said the were going to do it, don’t understand that,” he said.
    He says best-case scenario for the town would be to see the plant converted and to natural gas and retain about half the employees.
    “If you lose those 50-some jobs a the power plant, and the oil and gas sector goes up a bit because of this, then we might gain a few jobs back in operators and alike, so it is not a total loss. But ATCO could say ‘we are going to shut the whole thing down’ and we would lose 20 and some families, that’s pretty stressful.”

    A Drumheller Firefighter has developed an app to help emergency responders by improving response times.
Mitch Farmer has developed an app called Fire Hall Utility. Its aim is to improve response time for First Responders by automating the alerting, acknowledgement and response to emergency calls. The app is changing the way rural Firefighters dispatch calls, and sales have started taking off.
Farmer had started volunteering for the Drumheller Fire Department when he was 21, and quickly realized the method used to call in firemen was out dated and inefficient.
“I’ve always loved technology”, said Farmer, “and used to spend hours every day learning code.” He thought that an app that texted the call out might be a cost effective solution for his local firehouse to use.
“I also integrated a mapping solution so that no time was wasted with wrong turns, which is especially important on rural roads.”
After months of trial and error, he brought a beta version to his local crew and it was an instant success.
The app has evolved into the Fire Hall Utility’s application suite that links to the 911-dispatch centers CAD (Computer Aided Dispatch) system. Each time a call is received, the details and location are electronically passed to the Fire Hall Utility servers. There, the information is inserted into a database, and the response maps are instantly created.
All first responders in the area are notified by text message, and the first responders who are available simply click a link in the message, which registers them as responding to the call while simultaneously displaying a map of the call location.
In the fire hall, the app displays the call details, map, and a list of responders on a large screen. In the fire trucks, iPads or smart phones display turn-by-turn directions, locations of the closest fire hydrants, and live weather information.
Fire departments are a very close-knit community and word has quickly spread, with sales across Canada and into the United States. “We’re perfect for the smaller centres that don’t have the budget or the man power for the more expensive technology,” said Farmer. “We manage the day-to-day development, security, tech support, hosting, monitoring, and sales. We’re expanding our services, and I’m excited to see where the next year takes us.”
Canadian based Fire Hall Utilities is a leading supplier of Fire Call out software. They provide services to many Fire Halls worldwide.