Since late March the four watches – red, green, blue and white – have been split between the service’s Rouge Bouillon and Les Quennevais bases, the latter of which is normally only used by on-call crews when they are needed.
The decision to split the four crews over two sites was made to ensure that if one unit was affected by Covid-19, the virus would not spread to everyone in the organisation.
And with the shortage of beach lifeguards, the contingency measure means that the Fire and Rescue Service has been able to station one of its inshore lifeboats in the west of the Island – allowing it to respond to coastal emergencies at western beaches more quickly than from town.
But despite offering better response times to some incidents, chief fire officer Paul Brown says he does not see the temporary measures being made permanent.
‘Clearly an awful lot of activity does not happen around the western parishes – it happens around the town area. But it stands to reason that in those instances where something happens in the west, then we are quicker at the moment,’ he said.
‘We probably have a bit of luck on our side in that we had to do this for Covid-19 reasons and we have therefore had these assets out at Les Quennevais and at the same time the RNLI have not been able to provide their full levels of lifeguard cover.’
Last month, crews from the Western Fire Station were called to deal with a bin fire in Grouville, as the town crew was already dealing with another incident.
The fire was caused by a barbecue which had been disposed of before it had cooled down – one of six such incidents the service had to deal with that
week.
‘Inherently this model makes the Western Fire Station a little bit busier because both crews will respond all over the Island from those two locations. While in certain instances – particularly over that weekend and on other occasions – it has been quite useful. In the long run it does take a bit more effort to do it that way.
‘It denies us a bit of flexibility around our crewing arrangements and how we can use our staffing, covering leave and absences – it is a little more difficult. It has worked brilliantly in the circumstances, but I do not think it is something we would look to pursue if we were not in the situation we were in.’
It was recently revealed that an on-site fire crew will be necessary to ensure the safe operation of the new Nightingale hospital.
Mr Brown said there were a number of options open to the service, including using the western firefighters to man the site.
‘If we were to find ourselves in that situation, and hopefully we will not, it will mean that crew is then less flexible and less available to do bits of training and other duties,’ he
said.
‘So what we would like to do is spread the load a little bit there and move that around so that all of the crews are doing roughly the same amount [of cover] and that is a relatively straightforward thing to do – it is not a problem.’
