​Introduction​

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       Our project aims to conduct an analysis of fire hall response times in seven municipalities in the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD). We found this to be an interesting and relevant topic to study because as population continues to increase throughout the GVRD, fire services will have to try to keep up and offer appropriate service to as many people as possible. If population increases dramatically, how will this affect the response time of the fire halls in the GVRD? This is the main question we are asking and upon which we base our project. The municipalities in our study area are: Vancouver, Burnaby, Coquitlam, Richmond, Delta, Surrey and White Rock. According to international standards, emergency fire response should arrive within four minutes of the call for help (Brinklow et al., 2006). With this in mind, we have obtained the necessary data (see ‘Methodology’) and manipulated it using ESRI’s ArcGIS program to create service area maps (see ‘Results’), that show areas along the GVRD road network that can be reached by fire crews within this time frame.
       Another aspect of our project is to show the population density at the dissemination block level within each municipality and how this affects the service areas. As population increases, the road network becomes more congested. This ultimately increases the time it takes to travel along a given road and thus reduces the service area, potentially leaving people who were originally within four minutes of a fire hall outside of the new service area. We have used population data from 2011 (Service Area 2) and then used projected population numbers for 2041 according to Metro 2040 (2009) to show how population increase will alter current service areas (Service Area 3). Further details on the data and data manipulation techniques can be found in the ‘Methodology’ tab and a detailed discussion on our findings and results can be found in the ‘Discussion’ tab.