East Hants, Nova Scotia

The Municipality of East Hants comprises rural communities in the eastern half of the county of Hants, bordering the Halifax Regional Municipality, the Municipality of West Hants, and Colchester County.

Fire protection in East Hants is provided by thirteen individual fire departments which are members of a mutual-aid organization collectively known as East Hants Fire Service. The departments retain their own administrations and corporate identities, but at least twelve of them have since 2009 operated under a common Standard Operating Guidelines (SOG) document. Uniacke District Volunteer Fire Department in Mount Uniacke may be the exception here, as they operate less closely to the other departments.

Membership in the departments is almost entirely volunteers; Enfield (station 1100) has two paid members covering the day shift.

Departments in East Hants are identified by station numbers, which prefix radio call signs:

100 - Shubenacadie

200 - Elmsdale

300 - Nine Mile River

400 - Lantz

500 - Maitland

600 - Milford

700 - Noel

800 - Rawdon

900 - Gore

1000 - Kennetcook

1100 - Enfield

1200 - Indian Brook

1300 -Walton

Radio communication is via VHF, with a shared repeater system for communication with dispatch and seven simplex operations channels available for all departments; the assignment of operations channels is done by dispatch at the request of the responding department.

There is a highly evolved mutual-aid protocol in place, with most stations having several automatic-aid levels established with dispatch for speedy access to resources. Geography in East Hants has led to the formation of smaller sub-groups within the larger body, and each location will "pull in" a slightly different group of departments for a given response. These groupings also tend to train together periodically, although some training is also done across all stations and there is conscious effort to keep communications between the departments strong.