Thank you very much for asking that question. It gives me an opportunity to explain to members of the committee why a fire chief is sitting in front of them and testifying on organized crime in British Columbia.
In 2003, 2004, and 2005 in our community, our firefighters were attending 1.3 fires per month that were caused by marijuana grow-ops. That's 15 to 16 a year. They had concerns and started to treat every structure fire like a grow-op. They were concerned about entering those homes in a smoke-filled environment. They were concerned about getting shocked or electrocuted, which they had been, but not fatally. They were concerned about dealing with that kind of environment.
They were concerned about arriving in the middle of the night and finding two and three houses on fire, or being impinged on by fire, because a house was set on fire by a grow-op and nobody was in attendance so nobody called it in. They were concerned about trying to evacuate homes where people were sleeping; they were concerned about trying to get them out.
Those were the things that got us involved in doing public safety inspections, which started in the city of Abbotsford and the city of Surrey in 2005. Since then, we've been using this as a preventative tool. We changed the laws in British Columbia to require the hydro authority to disclose to the local government hydro records that were three times the normal amount, and we initiated inspections using the Local Government Act, the Fire Services Act, and the electrical Safety Standards Act to request permission to--