North Wales Fire and Rescue Service

Operational area
Country	United Kingdom
Part	Wales
Region	North Wales
Agency overview
Established	1996 (1996)
Chief Fire Officer	Simon Smith
Facilities and equipment
Stations	44
Website
www.nwales-fireservice.org.uk

The North Wales Fire and Rescue Service (Welsh: Gwasanaeth Tân ac Achub Gogledd Cymru) is the fire and rescue service covering the predominantly rural principal areas of Anglesey, Conwy, Denbighshire, Flintshire, Gwynedd and Wrexham in the north of Wales.

The service was created in 1996 by the Local Government (Wales) Act 1994 which reformed Welsh local government, by a merger of the previous Clwyd and Gwynedd fire services. It covers an area of 2,400 square miles (6,200 km²) with around 670,000 people. The Service employs over 1000 staff in operational and support roles.^[1]

The fire authority which administers the service is a joint board made up of councillors from Anglesey, Conwy, Denbighshire, Flintshire, Gwynedd and Wrexham councils.

Fire stations and appliances

North Wales Fire & Rescue Service is the only fire service in the UK to not use electronic sirens. All of their fire appliances have either two-tone horns or Martinshorn fitted.

The fire & rescue service operates three duty crewing systems: they are wholetime (WT), day-crewed (DC) and an "on-call" retained duty system (RDS). Wholetime fire appliances are crewed twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Day-crewed appliances are crewed by wholetime firefighters based at the fire station between 8am and 6pm. The same firefighters then provide cover from home outside of these hours as retained firefighters. Retained firefighters are summoned to the fire station by pager from home or work to respond to emergency calls. Cross-crewing (CC) is a cost-cutting measure that sees various fire appliances being crewed by a single crew. This means, for example, if an appliance in the cross-crewing system responds to an incident, any other appliances in the system have to go off-the-run as they will have no crew. Many UK fire services have been forced to operate this system because of cuts to their budgets.

Fire appliance glossary

• WRL - Water Ladder: P1 / P2 / P3
• DRP - Dual-Role Pump: M1
• WfU - Wildfire Unit: W1
• L2P - Light two-wheeled drive Pump: L1
• L6P - Light six-wheeled drive Pump: L1
• ALP - Aerial Ladder Platform: A1
• WIU & IRBt - Water Incident Unit & Inflatable Rescue Boat: B1
• ICU - Incident Command Unit: C1
• EPU - Environmental Protection Unit: H1
• ET - Emergency Tender: R1
• FoC - Foam Carrier: S1
• ISU - Incident Support Unit: S1
• GPV - General Purpose Vehicle: T1 / T7
• PM - Prime Mover: T8 / T9
• CRV - Community Response Vehicle

Pods:

• HVP - High Volume Pump
• HLU - Hose Layer Unit

Chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear response

• IRU - Incident Response Unit: H9

See also

• List of British firefighters killed in the line of duty
• North Wales Police

External links

• Official website

References