For one afternoon each fall, the big overhead doors roll up and the public is invited to walk among the trucks. Melville Fire and Rescue's annual open house runs Sunday, Oct. 18, 2026, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., and it is free, open to all ages and built around the kind of demonstrations most people only ever glimpse from behind a barricade.
The centrepiece is a live vehicle extrication — the deliberate, methodical work of peeling a wrecked car open to reach the people inside. Crews will also stage a car fire scenario, showing how a vehicle blaze behaves and how it is attacked. Between demonstrations, visitors can tour the fire apparatus and emergency medical services displays, meet the firefighters and EMTs who staff them, and ask the questions that only come up when you are standing next to the equipment.
There is a fire safety house for hands-on lessons aimed at children, a bounce house to keep the youngest attendees occupied, and blood pressure screenings for the adults. Refreshments, raffles and giveaways round out the afternoon. The department's stated aim is straightforward: give residents a clearer picture of what the service does, and give neighbours a chance to talk with the people who show up when something goes wrong.
That service has deep roots in Melville. The city, about 145 kilometres northeast of Regina and 45 kilometres southwest of Yorkton, grew up around the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway and was named for Charles Melville Hays, the railway executive who died on the Titanic. It was incorporated as a village in 1908, a town in 1909 and a city in 1960, and it remains one of the smallest cities in Saskatchewan, with a population of roughly 4,500 in the 2021 census.
In a city that size, the fire department is not an abstraction. It is neighbours. Norm Konechny, who signed up as a volunteer on Oct. 1, 1969, at the age of 21, recalled in a 2020 Global News interview that he grew up watching the men in his family and community answer the call — his father and two uncles were involved — and that he became the youngest member of a department that then numbered 13 volunteers and two trucks.
His account of how the job has changed is a compact history of rural firefighting in Saskatchewan. Before 911 and cellphones, the siren outside the local fire hall was the summons. Training happened on the job. "You came to a scene and you learned from the guys," Konechny said. Recruits rode on the back of the truck, unbuckled, because there was nowhere else to sit. And the tools were whatever was at hand: "Our jaws of life at the time was a hammer, a pry bar and so on, where now we have the best."
That contrast — the pry bar versus the hydraulic spreader — is essentially what an open house puts on display. The extrication demonstration is the modern version of a job that was once improvised with hand tools, performed by a department that has kept its volunteer character even as its equipment and training have professionalized. Konechny, still serving as deputy fire chief more than half a century after he joined, told Global News he had never set a date to retire: "I love my department, I love everybody on it, I love what I'm doing, and I guess that's why I'm still here."
Melville Fire and Rescue works alongside neighbouring crews across the region, responding to collisions and fires well beyond the city limits — a reminder that in this part of the province, mutual aid is not a formality but a working arrangement. The open house is a chance to see the apparatus that makes that possible, and to watch the crews train in conditions closer to the real thing than a classroom allows.
The event runs rain or shine at the department's headquarters. There is no ticket, no admission fee and no capacity limit — residents simply show up. For families looking for a free Sunday outing, and for anyone curious about how emergency services actually operate, the doors are open from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.