Your house is on fire, to get to your property the local volunteer fire department has to cross your neighbours property, a given, right.
Whoops, not so fast.
If your local volunteer department doesn’t have an afilliation with the local government, the answer maybe no.
Recently unaffiliated departments in the Thompson-Nicola Regional District were asking the Regional District to take them over and that is when it was revealed there is a flaw in laws that govern volunteer fire departments, especially those in more rural areas.
Departments not under the protection of a government body don’t have automatic entry rights and that is true of two departments in the Cariboo Regional District, McLeese Lake and Tyee Lake.
As a result, Steve Forseth, RD Director for Area ‘D’ is asking both of the those volunteer departments to get letters from each of the land owners in their respective area.
Forseth says for Tyee Lake it should be relatively easy with only about 60 properties, but for McLeese Lake, it means tracking down more than 300 residents to get permission.
Other departments in the Cariboo-Chilcotin are covered by some form of local government, like 150 Mile House under the CRD and of course , the cities of Williams Lake, 100 Mile House and Quesnel by their respective city governments.