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May 28, 2004
A service to be proud of!
A trawl for news on the web has turned up some interesting items, but I have decided to talk about the fire service. A visit to the website of one of the "local" Brigades turned up their fleet data and some readers may find this an interesting site to visit. Our vehicles are a very specialised area - far removed from what is required for the bin lorry or a bus, or, for that matter, any ordinary commercial application. For one thing, it will spend almost its entire life fully laden - and be expected to start immediately and go rapidly up to an emeregncy speed from cold. The cab design is ergonomic because the crew have to arrive safe and fully rigged at their destination. It is also designed to ensure that the driver does not have to use his hands for much beyond steering it. The controls are all arranged around him to minimise distraction as he drives. The cab itself is braced and reinforced to ensure that it does not crumple or crush in the event of an accident.
Few people these days realise just how wide a remit the Fire Service covers. The list of services we deliver is extensive and growing, yet, and this is in part at the root of the dispute, there is at present no statutory duty for us to do most of it. Nor is there funding provided for a great deal of what we do.
Existing legislation says we are established to: -
protect life and property from fire,
give advice on fire prevention,
gather information in respect of certain high risk premises for the purposes of fire fighting, and
conduct inspections of buildings for fire safety,
Nothing there about rescuing people from quarries, wrecked motor cars, train crashes, air crashes, collapsed structures, cats from trees, animals from mud banks, pits, or other traps, and so on. Yet this probably constitutes around 60% of our emergency work today. Added to this we conduct a wide range of inspections both for enforcement and in an advisory role to other enforcers. Public education (now called grandly Community Fire Safety) has long been one of our remits, but it was always a "goodwill" exercise, never properly supported although everyone knew the value.
In the last hundred years or so there have been huge advances in the technology we use and in our own understanding of the mechanism that is fire. Thus we are today a highly skilled and technically engaged profession - a far cry even from where the service was 30 years ago. Our personal protective clothing, our breathing apparatus, and our training have all advanced by huge technological leaps in that time. So have the incidents we have to deal with. Sadly, every advance in materials has brought with it a concommitant change in fire behaviour, development, growth, and heat output. Alongside that have come changes to the way buildings are constructed, so the fire fighter has to understand exactly what the effect of both the fire and his fire fighting tactics are likely to do to the structure he is attempting to save.
Then there are the contents of the buildings, which decompose in the fire and give off a wide range of extremely toxic products in the smoke plume - which can travel hundreds of miles. Chernobyl was bad - some of the stuff in warehouses (unprotected thanks to the Civil Service and Politicians' reluctance to make sprinklers compulsory) has the potential to be just as damaging to the environment and to peoples health - but it will be much more difficult to prove! We are talking about a variety of heavy metal oxides here, such as Beryllium, Antimony, and a few others including, Mercury. Some buildings have such potentially harmful contents that the Environment Agency has issued the Fire Service with notices saying that no fire fighting is to occur in case the water used washes the toxic contents into the ground water and the food chain.
Needless to say, the fire service finds this difficult to do, but we have to be equally aware of the potential exposure risks to our people and take measures to protect them from contamination.
New legislation currently before parliament will formalise much of this and give us new powers to investigate fires more thoroughly. They also require us to work with other interested agencies such as the Police, Health and Safety Executive, the Environment Agency, and others to reduce fire losses, pollution, and risks to life and property. A visit to this site will allow you to look at the Bill currently in the Lords in "Grand Committee" and which will become law in the Autumn.
Throughout the 30+ years I have been associated with the service, I have been proud of the way the service has embraced new technology, new ways of doing things, and its unswerving service to the community it serves. Sadly our political masters have decreed that it is not "representative", not "inclusive", and are seeking to reduce it to the same status as the Waste Disposal services and other "unskilled" local government tasks. The professional edge, developed and honed to meet the demands of our technology-laden age are now seen as a barrier to "disadvantaged" groups, and so it is decreed that we must be under the control of "managers" - not "officers" - and the discipline must be removed in order to include those who find taking orders threatening or draconian.
It is to be hoped that those now rising in the ranks will be able to moderate the worst excesses of those stupid enough to think that the service can still deliver the quality of service it does under these "dumbing down" strictures. If they cannot, the service you, the public, have relied on for the last century or so will soon be unable to attend the bulk of the incidents it currently deals with safely, because it will no longer have the expertise.
Spare a thought for the people who man the big red lorries - and take a look at what they have to know in order to do their work safely, effectively and efficiently. They are the ones who, despite the continual interference of the arrogant cretins who inhabit Whitehall and the town halls, manage to limit the damage whenever you and your neighbours need their services. They can only do that if they continue to be selected on ability and intelligence, and are given an environment wherein they continue to feel proud, positive, and professional about their role and the service they offer.
Posted by The Gray Monk at May 28, 2004 08:58 AM