The Okotoks Fire Department has made some adjustments in their Fire Services By-Law.

By-Law 10-17 was approved by Okotoks Town Council on Monday freeing up some authority on regulating types of burning bans at any given time along with updating violations that they've encountered over the past 19 years.

Fire Chief Ken Thevenot says it's all of the process of a growing municipality like Okotoks.

"As communities change, fire services has changed as well," he says. "We're just trying to update and modernize our by-law from 1998 to reflect industry standards along with regulations and legislation."

Thevenot says the by-law needed to be modified as the Town slowly begins it's annexation plans.

"This does give us some leeway in this fire by-law in particular where we can do partial bans. So if we're in annexation of land in some areas in town that we want in particular have a partial ban on but other areas can use it just because for one area for reason that we need to mitigate that area."

The by-law also helps the department get a better grasp on controlling burns within Town when there's a state of emergency anywhere in the province Thevenot says.

"We can put the ban on if we ever run into another Fort McMurray incident provincially where a lot of the resources were taken from the south going up north and that was one of the reasons they held our department back and a number of others for us to hold the line in south area if something was to go wrong."

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