A handful of Hampstead residents turned up at Montreal city hall last Thursday evening to present briefs and to testify to the Montreal Agglomeration Council's Public Security Commission.

Hampstead's firehall is one of several across the island that the Service de Sécurité-incendie de Montréal (SIM) wants to shut permanently.

The Macdonald Avenue building has been closed since last April for health and safety reasons. One of the closest firehalls to Hampstead now is Station 4 on Van Horne Avenue near Decarie Boulevard in Snowdon.

The closing of Hampstead's firehall, which will be subject to a recommendation by the commission, is a small part of the SIM's overall fire station location and resource deployment study, in which computerized risk assessment plays an important part.

The study was done using CADAnalyst, a program which evaluates the performance of the existing system based on recorded data, and FireADAM, a mathematical model that is used to predict future performance with resource deployment alternative strategies.

However, an expert hired by the SIM to evaluate the study did little to dispel apprehensions that the computerized model may have limitations. In a brief submitted to the commission, J. Gordon Routley, a fire protection engineer in the U.S. and in Canada, concluded:

"The accuracy of the computer model should be fully validated by comparing the projections to documented performance. Also, the data produced by the computer model should be considered in an appropriate context, including actual experience and professional judgment."

In a brief Hampstead town councillor Bonnie Feigengbaum read out, she noted that Hampstead taxpayers footed the bill for their station, as well as for an $800,000 ladder truck, for which they are still paying.

"On behalf of the council and the residents of Hampstead, I protest the unjustified closing of Hampstead's only fire station," she said, adding that it is "leaving us the only town without our own fire station on the island."

According to Feigenbaum, the response time for minor fires and false alarms on 40 percent of Hampstead's territory is now almost a minute longer. "Keep in mind that a fire doubles every minute," she said.

Rachel Genziuk, a resident of Hampstead, noted that the town no longer has First Responder service as a result of their station's closing. "We can sit here tonight and argue whether the responders are there in three minutes or four minutes or five minutes — it makes no difference because we have no First Responders," she said.

"The territory is very well protected even if we are closing the fire stations," insisted SIM director Serge Tremblay. "We improved a lot the protection of your territory when the fire department was amalgamated. I know that for you it is difficult. But for us the figure when we are talking about response time is very, very good."