Suffolk Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) is the statutory fire and rescue service covering the county of Suffolk in East Anglia, England. It was formed in 1948 as the Suffolk &amp; Ipswich Fire Service, before changing after the 1974 Local Government Review to 'Suffolk Fire Service'. Following the 2004 Fire &amp; Rescue Services Act, the service name was changed to Suffolk Fire &amp; Rescue Service to better reflect its role. Suffolk has a population of 760,556 and covers . The county town is Ipswich with other major towns including Lowestoft, Bury St-Edmunds, Felixstowe and Newmarket.
Headquarters and Control Room.
The headquarters of Suffolk Fire and Rescue Service is located within Endeavour House, Russell Road, Ipswich. This is also the location of Suffolk County Council's Ipswich based offices and meeting space. The Combined Fire Control Room is shared between Suffolk Fire &amp; Rescue Service and Cambridgeshire Fire &amp; Rescue Service and is situated at Hinchingbrooke Cottage, Brampton Road, Huntingdon (Cambridgeshire). It is responsible for handling all 999 emergency calls received across Suffolk and Cambridgeshire and mobilising resources to incidents. The Control Room has 5 watches, Blue, Green, White, Red and Day which are headed by the Control Group Commander.
Performance.
Every fire and rescue service in England and Wales is periodically subjected to a statutory inspection by His Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire &amp; Rescue Services (HMICFRS). The inspections investigate how well the service performs in each of three areas. On a scale of outstanding, good, requires improvement and inadequate, Suffolk Fire and Rescue Service was rated as follows:
Incidents.
In the year to October 2020, SFRS attended 5,212 incidents, where 2,409 were false alarms, 814 were primary fires, 860 were secondary fires, 304 were road traffic collisions (RTC) and 825 were special service. Across these incidents, there were six reported fatalities, with 179 casualties. This is compared to 243 fatalities and 6,910 casualties for the whole of England in the same period. The average response time for the first fire engine to arrive on scene was 10minutes and 4seconds. The service has noted a significant reduction in demand for its 999 services over the last 10 years. The summer heatwave in 2018, which affected much of England, led to a significant increase in the number and size of crop and other fires in the countryside. Forecasts of climate changes will increase the frequency of this type of event.
Fire stations.
The service has 35 fire stations, where 14 are jointly shared between either police and/or ambulance. The stations are divided into three districts, North Suffolk, South Suffolk and West Suffolk, each supervised by a District Manager. These stations include:
The stations are crewed by mixture of wholetime (works full time at a fire station to respond immediately), day-crewed (works full time at a fire station only during the day) and on-call/retained (where they live locally and travel to their fire station when their alerter/pager goes off). Some stations are also cross-crewed by a mixture of firefighters from other stations, wholetime and on-call.
References.
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