August 07

Blog for Monday 13th August 2007

A most interesting evening visit for the Club: Haddenham Fire Station had already come into our ken with the recent thunderbolt fire near Keith Smith’s house (indeed, he had rung 999). So it was good to hear about the recently reformed fire service from David Norris who met us in the Brigade Training School housed in extensions to the original fire station and added about six years ago.
David is the station manager and responsible for the other retained fire stations in the County. First a few statistics: 669 staff, 42 front line vehicles based in twenty fire stations of which only six are staffed with regulars, the rest with retained staff. The full time stations are in the towns like Aylesbury and High Wycombe. A retained station has the same equipment, etc, but the crews have other full time jobs and are summoned by pagers. For example the great Haddenham Thunderbolt Fire was reached in ten minutes, half of which time was spent by the paged firemen getting to the fire station. That was amazing in itself so it must be a requirement that they can deploy to the Station very quickly, almost within sight and running distance.

Station Manager David Norris

Mike Ginsberg takes a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Mike was part of the fire industry for more than thirty years

Tonight's watch go through their training paces

"The only difference between men and boys, is the size and price of their toys."

A threatening sky eventually drove us
off to the pub

Part of the practice night as a fire office emerges from the tower

The Bucks fire brigade received 21,000 emergency calls last year of which 4,000 were false alarms. It became apparent that the Fire Brigade’s mission has changed and fires are only a part of it. We all know that they are now called Buckinghamshire Fire and Rescue and deal with three major aspects: prevention, protection and response. I was unclear at this point having run out of paper but it seemed that their main task is prevention of fire and anyone who has one should be ashamed of themselves. Distorted view no doubt but, from my (current) local government perspective I got slightly anxious with the talk about risk assessment and risk management. The vision of the fire chief filling in a form to assess the risk factors before turning on a hose sounded depressingly modern. Mind you David said skip fires are very often deliberate and booby trapped with gas cylinders to try and maim Firemen (beggars belief, I know).
The stress is now on safety rather than saving property. So hoses are deployed to prevent spread as well as deal with the fire. All this change is a consequence of the 2004 Act. Words and acronyms like ‘Integrated Risk Management Plans’(IRMP), ‘Regional Management Boards’ ‘Health and Safety’ and ‘Comprehensive Performance Assessments’(CPA) sounded exactly like my Chief Executive at work. There is even talk of a regional control centre in Hampshire to make the Fire service shoe horn into the Government’s regional office jurisdictional areas. Sounded barking, but the Police managed to fight off this rampant centralisation. So good luck to the County Fire Brigades, although they are not under the Home Office but under the latest conglomerate government department: Communities and Local Government I think David said.
Under cross examination David came close to conceding semi-paralysis caused by Health and Safety considerations. David gave us an excellent and clear presentation which had us all enthralled. After this we went into the station yard for a demonstration by one of the Haddenham retained fire crews who played hoses on their fire tower and deployed a ladder to rescue any occupants from windows. That was good fun and we participated fully as the wind blew spray from the hoses over the assembled throng.
It was a splendid outing, capped by lasagne and chips back at base in the Rose and Thistle (accompanied by salad to make the meal more diet conscious).

Rtn Martin Andrew

Blog for Monday 6^th August 2007

With just over a month to go it was understandable that Monday’s meeting should have been almost entirely devoted to the arrangements for hosting the EUROTARY event at the end of September. The “captains” for each of the main components reported on progress and also recruited additional assistance, sometimes by coersion but often by press ganging.
It was clear that the event is all coming together very well and that the delegates will have a great time (providing that they catch the right bus at the right time!). The logistics of moving 200 people around Oxford and adjacent Buckinghamshire villages over 3 days has taxed the best brains that the club can marshal.

Main Component Capt No1
Keith Smith


Capt No 2 Roger Rickard	Capt No 3 Mike Pitcher
Capt No 4 Martin Andrew	Capt No 5 Peter Clark
Peter Jones awarding the 'Grumpling'	John Crowle presenting President Ken with a banner from (tbc)

The meeting was enlivened by a report by Chris Behan of his aquatic near death experience, by various non-politically correct jokes, including reference to the placing of towels to reserve bus seats, and the award of the club’s Grumpling Trophy to Peter Clarke for mixing up his Martins and Andrews (after all this time!) and for not switching off his phone.

Rtn. Roger Williams