Current Town Halls
When the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, we halted our regular Town Hall events without a space for public gathering. We recently held the first of a new series of town hall events in the fall of 2022.
For the first of our town halls in this series, we focused on fires.
The DTES has seen a massive increase in the amount of residential building fires in 2022. During the summer of 2022, the Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services weaponized those fires against people who were tenting on Hastings street, saying that tents pose a fatal fire risk to those in buildings and sheltering outside.
But fire safety is just one of many competing safety concerns for people sheltering outside, and when people are together and trained on how to use fire extinguishers, fires get put out before they can escalate.
Yet according to the VFRS’ own annual report, the biggest cause of fatal fires in residential buildings is broken sprinklers and alarms. And according to their own data, 40% of SRO Hotels have outstanding fire code violations.
Stay tuned for our newsletter on what we discussed and what’s coming!
