Instead of just fighting fires, Hanley’s volunteer fire department is focussing its efforts on preventing them.
The Town of Hanley recently received a $2,410 (US) fire prevention grant from FM Global, a large commercial property insurance company.
The fire department will use the money to develop pre-fire planning to efficiently collect and track data related local to buildings. This will help firefighters to respond to emergencies and it will assist in their training.
Specifically, the funds will be used for courses to train members to do fire inspections, says Hanley’s administrator Darice Carlson. The funds will also be used to buy a laptop computer and special software that will help firefighters preplan their fire response.
“At FM Global, we strongly believe the majority of property damage is preventable, not inevitable,” says Michael Spaziani, manager of the fire prevention grant program. “Far too often, inadequate budgets prevent those organizations working to prevent fire from being as proactive as they would like to be. With additional financial support, grant recipients are actively helping to improve property risk in the communities they serve.”
The fire prevention grants are awarded quarterly to fire departments and municipal and community organizations worldwide that best demonstrate a need for funding and where the money can have a demonstrable impact on preventing fire or mitigating the damage it can quickly cause.

A wealth of needy Costa Rican and South American people have a new lease on life thanks to the recent kindness of a few charity organizations and the actions of two local humanitarians.

Davidson’s Larry and Judi Packet travelled to San José, Costa Rica, last month to distribute over 30 free new wheelchairs to handicapped people with the help of the Knights of Columbus, the Canadian Wheelchair Foundation and the Active 20-30 International Club. The Packets, along with a group of fellow philanthropists, gave out the wheelchairs to needy people both at their homes in San José and also at the city’s Children’s Hospital.

Larry Packet, a territory district deputy with the Knights of Columbus, said their organization collaborated with the Wheelchair Foundation to purchase the wheelchairs. He said they then partnered with the 20-30 Club chapter in San José, who assessed who needed and should get a wheelchair, to distribute the medical equipment.

“The experience with the Wheelchair Foundation was at first quite overwhelming,” said Packet, noting they actually had around 130 wheelchairs to distribute in Costa Rica, but an union dispute at a Costa Rican shipyard detained 100 of the chairs from being given out during their trip. “We went to some better neighbourhoods to deliver wheelchairs and we also went to some very poor neighbourhoods to deliver wheelchairs. We take a lot of stuff for granted here when you see how other people live. Their houses are…marginalized. They are very poor people and just giving them a wheelchair seems to be a simple gesture, but you can just tell it brought a lot of longevity to their life.”

Some examples Packet said he heard about the difference the chairs would make to people’s lives includes one young boy who needed a wheelchair to be able to attend school and now could do so and another young woman who can now attend and excel at a business college without the burden of worrying about the troubles of her old wheelchair.

“The people at the hospital came from miles and miles,” he said. “One lady drove five-and-a-half hours from Panama to come and get a wheelchair for her son, so it covered a big area. The ones in the container I haven’t heard yet what happened, but the 20-30 Club is going to look after distributing them…I would imagine that the 20-30 Club in Costa Rica has delivered them by now.”

To read more please see the March 10 print edition of The Davidson Leader.

Students at Imperial School are following the white rabbit down the rabbit hole this week.

The complete student body from grades one to 12 is immersing themselves in a Missoula Theatre Company musical adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic “Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland”. The kids are going to be studying under the direction of two trained actors/directors with the Montana-based touring company this week culminating in a dessert theatre performance of the musical at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. this Saturday at the Imperial Community Hall.

Carol Baade, a drama teacher at Imperial School, said this is the first time in the 17 years she has been involved with the annual school musical that they have brought in a touring company to help students put on the show. She said it should be a “great experience” for the students, as they’ll be able to find out everything that goes into putting on a professional production.

“It’s a really neat opportunity for the students because these are all professionals and they come and do workshops during the classes for the students and help put on the show and also involve the younger students,” said Baade, noting past musicals usually involved only the high school students. “We’ve had very successful dessert theatres in the past…but we thought we’d try something different to give our students a new opportunity.”

Ethan Park and Shelby Mariah Art, the two members of the Missoula Children’s Theatre Company that are spending the week in Imperial to help the students put on “Alice in Wonderland”, begin the production by holding auditions for the musical today at the Imperial Community Centre. The 50 to 60 students picked begin rehearsals later this evening and continue to practise for four-and-a-half hours each day before the performance on Saturday.

The students that are not cast in a role would be involved as assistants to the directors or help with stage crew work, lighting, sound or preparation and serving “Queen of Hearts Cherry Tarts” desserts. The Imperial School senior band is also performing at the show and Jeanne Knoblauch has been retained to accompany the musical on piano.

To read more please see the March 10 print edition of The Davidson Leader.

Telemarketers with a too good to be true sales pitch designed to empty a person’s wallet for something that is not too good at all have found a new way to get people to fall for their tricks.

Daniel Williams, senior call-taker supervisor at the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, said vacation call centres in Florida have started using a new form of “Caller ID Spoofing” where the first six digits of a person’s phone number followed by four random numbers appear on the phone. He said this tricks people into believing they are receiving a local call offering them a once in a lifetime travel package to an exotic location for a small credit card payment, which makes the actual “lousy deal” easier to believe.

“A lot of consumers now are very hesitant about picking up any blocked or foreign looking numbers, (but) this call has nothing to do with the number that is showing up,” said Williams. “Sometimes the call display shows the name of the person who the phone belongs to and sometimes it doesn’t. The legitimate holder of that number, they’re not (the one) dialing. It’s simply a call display trick.

“Then there are different pitches that they’re using at the start and it’s usually automated and the most common one is, ‘you’ve won 260,000 Air Miles, if you wish to claim press one,’ and when you press one you get patched through to the vacation call centre in Florida.”

Williams said selling lousy vacation packages is not illegal and has been around for a while and will continue to be as long as people are willing to buy them. He said the deception is the way the telemarketers are getting their foot in the door.

“In the last year more and more of what we’re seeing is they’ve gone to this first six digits of your phone number and then a random last four,” he said, noting Caller ID Spoofing has actually been around since 2004 and used to just be a series of random numbers. “It’s very common now. Where it is really worth our while to document the information is the consumer who has bought the vacation package on their credit card and then feels they’ve been cheated because they went into this because of the connection with Air Miles.”

Terry Oxman, a resident of Davidson, said he received a call with the number 306-567-1731 Feb. 18 at around 2 p.m. stating that he had won a vacation or prize. He said initially he thought it was a “Davidson local thing” and only hung up on the person because it was a bad connection.

Oxman said he called the number right back and received a message from SaskTel saying this number is out of service. It was only then that he realized it was a scam.

“This is the first time I recall it being a local call,” he said. “I would hate to hear someone got stung by this thinking it was a Davidson number.”

To read more please see the March 3 print edition of The Davidson Leader.

An early morning crime spree that targeted unlocked vehicles has local RCMP once again reminding rural residents to lock up their stuff.
Const. Kam Hay of the Craik RCMP detachment said sometime during the early morning hours of Friday, Feb. 21 three vehicles were stolen from Davidson and numerous others were entered and had their contents searched.
It was easy pickings for the thieves. All three of the stolen vehicles had their keys left in the ignitions. The vehicles have all been recovered.
Davidson seemed to be at the tail end of this latest crime spree. RCMP have received reports of similar incidents occurring around the same time in Hanley, Kenaston and Bladworth.
Donna Bessey said someone went through the vehicles parked outside her home in Bladworth. Nothing was taken. The thieves also went into the Bessey’s garage, but she said they couldn’t tell if anything was missing.
She said the suspects tried to steal a couple of trucks from Bladworth, but there was so much snow, they couldn’t get the vehicles unstuck.
Const. Hay said people might help prevent these crimes by not leaving wallets, purses, electronic equipment and other valuables in vehicles. People should also not leave keys in parked cars and trucks.
“As long as it is easy, they will keep coming back,” Hay said.
If anyone has information about these crimes, they are asked to contact Craik RCMP or to call Saskatchewan Crime Stoppers.