This article is from page 12 of the 2007-03-06 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 12 JPG
CLARE County Council will reas- sess whether it is necessary to up- gerade the county’s largest fire sta- tion to a full-time service once the Department of the Environment has completed an analysis of future fire Oo
The county’s Chief Fire Office, Adrian Kelly, has confirmed that the department are taking a risk-based approach to the provision of fire cov- Jus NO A sCom ROUAD NKR
“On the basis of this methodology, Clare County Council can reassess what is the appropriate provision for
the Fire Service in the county. Cur- rently, we have the required standard of fire cover and there has been no fault with the service being provided in the past.”
Figures released by Clare County Council’s Fire and Rescue Service have revealed that in 2006, the fire brigade in Ennis responded to 568 calls, of which 127 were chimney fires and 105 were false alarms, ac- counting for 40 per cent of all calls in the town.
Chief Kelly believes that the number of callouts for the town’s fire service could be drastically reduced if the public improved their home fire safe-
ty and if the number of bogus calls made to the service was reduced.
There have been calls in recent years for Ennis fire station to be changed from a part-time to a full- time facility.
All of Clare’s seven stations are op- erated on a retained basis where fire- fighters respond to emergencies from their homes or places of work when alerted by a paging system.
The county’s station officers, the members in charge of each station, also work on a retained basis. Ennis fire brigade, however, has a fulltime station officer.
Some, including local representa-
tives and fire-fighters, believe it is time that the county’s largest and busiest station was upgraded to a full-time service where personnel would be based on site on a 24-hour- a-day basis, ready to respond to calls at a minute’s notice.
Clare Fine Gael Deputy Pat Breen said that Ennis Fire Station staff should to be made full-time in light of the 2006 call-out figures.
Deputy Breen says it is unac- ceptable that the 15 part-time staff should have to take the responsibility of such a busy service when they did not even have full-time status.