North Battleford Fire Department continues to see a major spike in needle pickups in 2019.
One pickup in May caught the attention of council at their meeting Monday. There were two instances where fire personnel were called to the Parsons Industrial Park area to pick up needles. There were 20 needles picked up following the first call; the second call resulted in 3,580 needles picked up.
According to Deputy Fire Chief Lindsay Holm, the calls were to a recycling facility in the area. Holm said that the needles were likely disposed of into the blue bins and then taken to the sorting facility.
Because it was a sorting facility, Holm did not rule out the possibility that the needles came in from outside the city.
Holm said the number was unusually high.
“We are seeing a spike, for sure, in the city,” Holm said. Around 2014 they had seen 54 needle pickups a year, but it has gone up drastically since then. In 2018 they collected 5,300 needles.
So far this year alone they are up to 8,300 needles picked up, Holm said.
Needle pickup calls are also up so far. Through the first five months of 2018 there were 72 needle pickup calls. This year the number is 131.
As for how to address the problem, Holm pointed to some good initiatives through SaskHealth that were going on which would be beneficial. He said he did make a couple of recommendations about adding a couple of additional safe disposal drop-boxes in areas where they were seeing high numbers of needles.
Other communities have implemented some initiatives to deal with needles and the indication from Holm is they would look at doing something similar.
“I think we’re going to be able to try and formulate some plans for how to deal with the spike we are seeing now.”
Mayor Ryan Bater noted the issue was not isolated to the city, but “the spike in numbers has been noticed,” he said. He urged the public to dispose of needles in the safe boxes that are set up, and reminded the public that disposing needles in the blue recycling bins is not safe.
