A serviced residential road running north from the town centre toward the bay, inside the fire district, with hydrants and a six-minute response on record.
Where Porpoise Bay Road sits, and the other places we attend
around Sechelt. Every name on the map is a link.
A serviced road, minutes from the hall
Porpoise Bay Road runs north from the downtown area toward the Porpoise Bay waterfront. It is inside the District of Sechelt and inside the Sechelt Fire Department's protection boundary, which is the same boundary as the municipality and also covers the Sechelt Indian Government District. It is not a dead end. It has Chapman Creek water and hydrants, and the only fire hall in the District is at 5525 Trail Avenue, a short distance south.
That combination is as good as servicing gets on this part of the Coast. It is also the reason this page exists, because it did not prevent what happened here in 2024.
Six minutes from the call to the truck
At 10:42 p.m. on 9 August 2026 a fire in cedars on Porpoise Bay Road was reported. The Sechelt Fire Department was on scene at 10:48 p.m. Six minutes. The department said the structure was close to being involved when they arrived, and that the fire was likely to have been human caused.
That is the fastest documented response anywhere in the twelve Sechelt neighbourhoods covered by these pages. Since January 2025 the department has kept three career firefighters on shift through the day, every day of the year, with a standby crew overnight from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. and six groups of paid-on-call firefighters providing round-the-clock coverage. The apparatus list includes two triple combination pumpers, a 100-foot mid-mount platform, a 1,600-gallon tender and a Type 6 wildland engine.
Six minutes is what the fire service can do. It does not begin until somebody calls, and at 10:42 on a summer night it was a neighbour who did.
Three break-ins at one house
In August 2024 residents of this neighbourhood put their experience to a public meeting. A woman who lives on Porpoise Bay Road said she had been entered three times. On one of those occasions what went was the contents of the freezer she kept in her shed. Streets named alongside hers in the same account were Ebbtide Street and Hightide Road.
The freezer detail is the useful one. By the third visit the tools, the bikes and anything else worth carrying had already gone, so the food went instead. That only happens at a property somebody has learned to come back to.
S/Sgt. Jennifer Prunty of the Sunshine Coast RCMP told that meeting that files are how the detachment learns which streets are being worked, and where to send its people.
Low counts are a function of how few houses there are
Porpoise Bay Road falls in the RCMP's smallest published Sechelt zone. Its totals were 78, 95 and 76 for 2023, 2024 and 2025, against 2,426 downtown in the last of those years. The zone looks quiet in the annual table, and it still produced a householder with three break-ins inside a year.
District-wide the direction is the other way. Residential break and enters went from 17 in 2023 to 20 in 2024 to 27 in 2025, a rise of 35 per cent. Thefts from vehicles ran 86, then 121, then 110. Mischief to property ran 146, 173 and 168. Arsons went 10, 9 and 16. Calls for service reached 4,376 in 2025. In the first quarter of 2026 Sechelt property crime files rose from 135 to 163 against the same quarter of 2025, an increase of 20.74 per cent.
The District can act against an unsecured empty building
Sechelt's Property Maintenance Bylaw No. 522, 2012 was amended by Bylaw 522-2 in 2022. The new section 2(j) makes it an offence for an owner to leave a vacant property or building unsecured, so that it can be entered, occupied, used, vandalised, put to unlawful use or made a fire hazard. The bylaw defines neither of the two key words, vacant and unsecure. The adopted ticket schedule under Bylaw 515, consolidated in February 2026, sets the penalty for section 2(j) at $450.
Enforcement is reactive and happens when a complaint comes in. In July 2024 council authorised staff to contract a service to bring one named address into compliance. An owner who lives off the Coast learns about a forced door when somebody else reports it.
What a check on Porpoise Bay Road covers
Every door and window on the shed and garage as well as the house, tried by hand
Freezers, tool stores and anything kept in an outbuilding, checked against the last photograph
Vegetation and cedars close to the building, which is where the August 2026 fire started
Heat still on and holding, or the supply closed at the main and the pipes emptied
Hot-water tank, under-sink connections and any sign of a running toilet or a wet ceiling
The street view of the house: mail, flyers, blinds, an unmoved vehicle
Whether anything about the building could draw a Bylaw 522 complaint
Dated photographs of each item, sent to you on the day of the visit
Household policies normally call for an empty dwelling to be attended at stated intervals over the cold months by a competent person, in a lot of wordings inside four days, or the supply closed and the pipes emptied. What your insurer requires may differ, so read it.
What it costs
A scheduled check at Porpoise Bay Road is
$55 a visit, plus
$10 travel. The travel charge is the same
everywhere between Gibsons and Egmont. There is no minimum term and no joining fee.
See the full price list.
Where these facts come from
Every figure, date and quotation on this page was taken from one of these. They are
listed so you can read them yourself.
