Essex County Fire and Rescue Service

Essex County Fire and Rescue Service (ECFRS) is the statutory fire and rescue service for the county of Essex in the east of England, and is one of the largest fire services in the country, covering an area of almost 400,000 hectares and a population of over 1.7 million people.^[1]

The service attends an average of 24,490 emergency incidents per year, mostly traffic collisions and conflagrations (3,117 of which were 'primary' fires in 2009/10)^[1]. During the same period, the service dealt with 905 primary fires that had been started deliberately, and 1,703 deliberate 'secondary' fires (those that do not threaten life or valuable property). Hoax calls in 2009/10 numbered 530.^[1]

ECFRS employs 1,640 staff, comprising 874 full-time firefighters, 479 retained firefighters, 43 control personnel and 244 support staff.^[2]

There are 50 fire stations throughout the county, 12 of which are wholetime and generally located in the more densely populated areas; 34 are retained and four are day-crewed, providing cover throughout the rest of Essex.^[3]

Major risks covered include Stansted and Southend airports, Harwich seaport, Lakeside shopping centre, Coryton oil refinery, docks at Tilbury and part of the M25 and M11 motorways and A12 trunk road.

As well as attending fires, traffic collisions and other rescue operations, ECFRS provides emergency response to hazardous materials incidents and one of the United Kingdom's urban search and rescue (USAR) teams: a team of officers with special training and equipment to conduct rescues from collapsed buildings and enclosed spaces. Their resources include a search dog trained to locate people trapped in rubble. Another primary role of the service is preventative community safety work; in 2010 ECFRS fitted over 7,000 smoke alarms in houses across the county.^[1]

Organisation

ECFRS's headquarters is located in Witham.^[3] In 2002 the service was divided into seven Community Commands, to reflect the increasing need for the fire service to work in closer contact with communities. They are:^[4]

1. Basildon and Castle Point Community Command
2. Chelmsford and Maldon Community Command
3. Colchester and Tendering Community Command
4. Harlow and Epping Community Command
5. Southend and Rochford Community Command
6. Thurrock and Brentwood Community Command
7. Uttlesford and Braintree Community Command

The Chief Fire Officer is David Johnson, since July 2005.

The Emergency Operational Fire Control is situated in Hutton. 46 control staff handle approximately 500,000 calls each year, including over 60,000 999 emergency calls. The control staff also carry out incident co-ordination, appliance mobilisation and movements to ensure strategic fire cover, movement of personnel and advanced call handling to give life protecting advice via the telephone. Radio communications are made between incidents and Fire Control and control staff liaise with other emergency services and provide additional resources when requested by firefighting personnel. Emergency calls are handled in an average of 54 seconds from the time of answering to the time of dispatching the fire crew.

There are five firefighter training centres, located in Basildon, Chelmsford, Orsett, Witham and Wethersfield.^[3]

The service workshop is in Lexden, and it is here that the operational fleet of 73 frontline fire appliances and 25 specialist appliances are maintained, and the reserve fleet of spare appliances are stored.

Appliances

ECFRS has the following fire appliances in operation:

• 52 Rescue Pumps: the standard firefighting vehicle mobilised to all emergency calls.
  

These appliances are equipped with a high-pressure two-stage main pump also capable of making foam via an onboard foam inductor system, two high-pressure hose reels, a set of rescue ladders, a light portable fire pump, four breathing apparatus sets, two spare breathing air cylinders and hydraulic rescue equipment, as well as other miscellaneous tools.^[5]

• 21 Water Tenders: similar to the Rescue Pump except with less emphasis on rescue equipment and greater water capacity.

In addition, there are a number of specialised appliances:

• 5 Aerial Ladder Platforms (ALP):^[1] extendible ladder platforms with rescue cages, stretchers and additional lighting, these vehicles provide high-level access and firefighting capability, with a vertical reach of almost 100 ft, almost 80 ft sideways, and up to 55 ft below ground level.^[5][6]
• 4 Light Water Tenders (Steyr Pinzgauers) (LWrT)
• 4 Rescue Tenders (RT): these lorries are fitted with forklift trucks, enhanced rescue gear including vehicle stabilisation and heavy-lift air bags, specialist casualty stretchers, casualty stabilisation and first aid equipment, an inflatable boat and salvage gear.^[5]
• 3 Foam Tenders^[1] (FT): introduced in 2011, these new units are cheaper to maintain and easier to use than the previous dated vehicles, and can provide state-of-the-art foam proportioning equipment for transport incidents and refinery fires.^[2]
• 3 Control Units^[1] (CU)
• 3 Fireboats (Fbt)
• 2 Water Bowsers^[1] (WrB)
• 1 Hose Layer (HL)
• 1 Animal Rescue Unit (ARU): introduced in April 2011, the ARU is based on an all-terrain Unimog chassis and is fitted with a Hiab crane capable of extending up to 13.7 m and lifting weights of up to 3,250 kg. The vehicle is also equipped with three 'pods' containing all the equipment that crews might need to carry out specialist animal rescues; its crew is specially trained in large animal rescue and welfare.^[7]
• 1 Flood Response Unit (FRU): two additional FRUs will be added to the fleet in the future.^[2]
• 1 Welfare Module (WM)
• 1 Environmental Module (EM): to help crews contain pollutants at incidents, this unit carries a wide range of equipment including pumps, oil and chemical absorbent materials, booms, drain-blockers and over-drums for containing leaking chemical containers. It was launched in July 2011.^[8]

The service is also reviewing requirements for a breathing apparatus tender.^[1] The standard appliances (Rescue Pumps and Water Tenders) are crewed by at least four and as many as six firefighters, while specialist units such as the Aerial Ladder Platforms and Rescue Tenders are crewed by a minimum of two.^[9]

USAR appliances, based at Lexden, include:

• 1 Incident Response Unit (based at Chelmsford) (IRU)
• 1 High Volume Pump (HVP)
• 5 prime movers with various demountable pods
• 1 Search Dog Unit
• 1 USAR personnel carrier

The service's driving school is at Chelmsford, and is home to three emergency fire appliance driving (EFAD) pumps and two multi-purpose driver training lorries.

Training centres at Wethersfield and Witham each have two designated training pumps.

Fire stations

• See: Interactive map of fire stations

This is a complete list of Essex's 50 fire stations, the duty system, appliances allocated to them, and number of emergency callouts in 2008:^[9][2]

Southend fire station is also home to the UK's first dedicated Young Firefighters' Centre, opened in July 2010.^[11]

Urban search and rescue team

State-of-the-art equipment, multi-purpose vehicles, a sniffer dog and a purpose-built base staffed with a highly trained and experienced team comprise the county's urban search and rescue (USAR) team.

The team is equipped to rescue victims trapped in the rubble of collapsed buildings, or major transport accidents, for example. They are able to locate and safely extract trapped person, and can shore up unstable buildings so that firefighters can continue with rescue operations.

The USAR team are equipped with prime movers, specialist hook-lift vehicles that can be loaded with one of five different equipment pods, depending on what situation the team are going to face. These pods include hose layers and high-volume pumps, technical rescue, timber for shoring up unstable structures, and even a multi-purpose skid loader that can access tight spaces, explore voids, and move heavy loads of debris.

Following the September 11 attacks new risks were shown to the world for which rescue services would need to be better prepared, and the British government responded with the announcement that USAR units were to be established throughout the country. The Lexden base became the UK's first such facility.

ECFRS was chosen as one of the 17 strategically suitable services partly because it already had 14 officers trained in urban rescue, members of the UK Fire Service Safety & Rescue Team who were part of the rescue effort that was sent to Bam in Iran after it was hit by a major earthquake in December 2003 where they helped in the search for victims amongst the ruins of the ancient city.

The station commander at Lexden, a specialist co-ordinator of search and rescue operations, was also sent with the EU Civil Protection Mechanism to Haiti in January 2010 after a major earthquake struck the country.

In February 2011, six ECFRS firefighters, including two from the USAR unit at Lexden, joined the UK's International Search and Rescue (ISAR) team sent to assist with rescue efforts in New Zealand's second city Christchurch after an earthquake hit the region.^[12]

Formed in 1992, the UK's ISAR team comprises specialist search and rescue officers drawn from 13 brigades who are on call 24 hours a day. The ECFRS team's primary role is urban search and rescue but it has also trained and involved in water rescue and working at height.

2007 Oxfordshire floods

ECFRS assisted in the emergency response to floods in Oxfordshire in 2007, where seven firefighters from the Swift Water Rescue team helped rescue victims trapped by the floods with a specialist fireboat.

Buncefield fire

Essex was one of 16 brigades called in to attend the large Buncefield oil depot fire near Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, in December 2005. Fire appliances from Orsett, Hadleigh, Harlow, and foam appliances from Grays, Maldon and Epping assisted in operations at the largest ever blaze in peacetime Britain.

See also

• Fire services in the United Kingdom
• Orsett Hall fire

Other emergency services:

• Essex Air Ambulance
• East of England Ambulance Service
• Essex Police

References

External links

• Official site