A former fire chief and city manager is joining Edmonton's Darkhorse Emergency to serve as the "translator" between the data-to-action company and its clients, which include fire chiefs and municipalities.
"I wasn't brought into the team just to grow, grow, grow," Darrell Reid, who formerly headed Strathcona County, told Taproot about his new role. "We're growing (already), and I suppose I'm here to help Darkhorse understand the (municipal fire) industry — and help the industry understand Darkhorse."
Darkhorse Emergency helps fire departments optimize their services by mapping the areas they need to serve and identifying where best to locate infrastructure like fire halls. The company was spun out of its parent, Darkhorse Analytics, in 2023. Darkhorse was itself spun out of a research lab at the University of Alberta in 2008. Darkhorse Analytics has created data visualization tools on climate vulnerability and public health outcomes. All told, there are 45 "Darkhorsian" employees, Reid said.
Darkhorse Emergency now has 41 clients, 40% of which are American and 60% of which are Canadian. The Canadian clients, including emergency departments, serve nearly 14 million people. By the end of 2025, Reid said, the company expects to grow to support organizations that in turn support 50% of Canada's population.
Reid, who wrapped work with Strathcona County at the end of January, worked with Darkhorse when he served as fire chief from 2008 to 2013, and again when he returned to be chief commissioner (or city manager) from 2020 to 2025. In the former role, he worked with Darkhorse Emergency to make the case to municipal administration and council that the county needed a new fire station. That resulted in the opening of Fire Station #6 in Sherwood Park in 2011. Darkhorse Emergency also helped plan the opening of Fire Station #7 last year, when Reid was chief commissioner for the county.
"There we were, in a situation with rapid growth in the community, and some resource deficits in terms of being able to respond to the risk created with that growth," Reid said of the experience of the sixth staton. "It was a very successful exercise and a good example of Darkhorse having expertise and resources that a mid-size municipality, and a mid-size municipality fire department, did not have."
Beyond Strathcona County, the company has worked for fire departments in the Edmonton region including St. Albert, the City of Leduc, and Leduc County.
Between his jobs in Strathcona County, Reid served as fire chief in Vancouver and as deputy fire chief in Toronto. The latter city's fire department served three million residents in comparison to Strathcona County's 200,000, Reid said. Darkhorse Emergency helped Reid and his department navigate a "significant and unexpected" budget cut in 2014, when then-Mayor Rob Ford ordered a fire station to close, "despite the fact that calls for service were growing rapidly."
"Darkhorse provided a lens and an approach to analytics that was fresh and different, and as a result, allowed us to message things in ways people hadn't necessarily heard them before — to tell some truths in ways that people can understand those truths," Reid said. "(The company enabled us) to make some decisions that helped that department redesign itself and re-resource itself to deal with increasing risk and calls to service."
Reid said his new role with Darkhorse Emergency is to act as a "translator" between Darkhorse's tech and its work with those in the public service. Since joining Darkhorse Emergency, Reid has been a face for the company at the Western Fire Chiefs Association's IGNITE Symposium in Las Vegas in early February. "It struck me right away how trusted and appreciated Darkhorse is by that group of progressive (fire) chiefs," Reid said. "A lot of Darkhorse clients were there, and it's a good thing when a client brings a bunch of non-clients to the booth."