One of the main strands of this 'modernisation' is to have all stations on a 'retained' basis at night. Basically this means that the fire station will be unmanned and in the event of a fire, the fire-fighters will be summonsed by pagers, the same way that they currently are in a lot of rural regions. The main reason for this is that fewer fires occur at night. However, the majority of fatalities in fires do occur at night and the recent deaths during the fire-fighters' strike all occurred at night. Over half of these happened in areas currently covered by retained crews who aren't on strike and would appear to give a grim foreshadowing of what may be to come. Currently one of the conditions for being in a retained crew is that you must live/work within one mile of the station. How they will apply this to whole time fire-fighters is still unclear. A good friend of mine is a station officer in Hampshire and currently lives 20 miles from his station so how he'll respond to fire calls at night is a mystery.  And I can't see many fire-fighters living within a mile of some of the inner London stations.DaveTo unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
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