Fire service start recruiting a volunteer crew

Wednesday 20 July 2016

The Fire Service are hoping to cut the number of house fires with the help of a new team of volunteers.

They tackled 45 last year and hope the new crews will be equipped to go into people's homes and make sure they are not putting themselves in danger.

At the moment it's the job of trained firefighters who make about 200 home fire safety visits a year and go into schools instilling life-long fire-safety lessons to children.

Deputy Chief Fire Officer Paul Brown said: “We had a volunteer team before, we liked it but the focus last time was supporting operational firefighters at incidents and that wasn’t busy enough, there wasn’t enough major incident action to sustain the team.

“In the next few years, we want to increase our prevention activity in the community. We want to increase the amount of prevention work we do. We typically use frontline crews but the danger is they get called out to an incident."

He eventually wants to increase the volunteer team to about 30 or 35 and says that although they won't save the service any money, they will help improve their service in the community.

He said: "It does bring a cost in, a tiny cost in the scheme of things, buying uniforms, but it’s extremely marginal.

"They won’t save us money but we’re going to make the savings anyway, adding the volunteers into the system allows us to do even more and will mitigate the risk of us having to leave an event which is disappointing for everyone."