Wildfires mean we have to fire all the on-call firefighters
Assume, for a moment, that wildfires here in the UK are the new normal:
Phil Garrigan, chair of the National Fire Chiefs Council, said that dealing with 11 major incidents at once meant that services were without sufficient numbers of fire engines and personnel to share with neighbouring areas last Thursday and Friday.
Instead, fire chiefs had to prioritise the most critical incidents. “It’s unprecedented, but the new normality, nevertheless,” Garrigan told The Observer on Saturday.
“We still had 43 wildfires occur in the last 24 hours,” he said.
Having the necessary physical kit in stock would be very sensible indeed. After all, we do know that whatever we try to do about emissions and the larger picture we are still going to have to do at least a bit of adaptation. But we can’t store firefighters in the same way.
Assuming this is the new normal we’re going to have to move to the systems used in places where this is normal. We don’t think that’s much of a leap of logic after all - if other people have solved a problem, we face that problem, we should use that solution. What the Latins do is have large - truly large - cadres of volunteer firefighters. 40,000 lightly trained to do the grunt labour in Portugal for example. With perhaps 2,000 fully trained and full time employed to act as the officer and NCO cadre. Scale that up to UK population size and we’re talking of a 300,000 volunteer wildfire extinguishing service.
Well, OK, a solution is a solution. But we’re clearly not going to have 300k people as full time paid firefighters to be called out for the 10 days every three or five years that there’s a problem in their own neighborhood. So, these do need to be volunteers. And, unpaid.
For there’s that recent ruling about the Coastguard and the volunteers who aided in rescues there. They have been ruled to be workers, workers cannot be on zero hours contracts. Therefore the only legal option is to stop paying them and insist they are fully, and only, voluntreers. Which is what will have to happen with our 300k force. And, also, we’d suggest the logic insists, we’ve got to move the current on-call firefighters to being purely volunteers. Simply because that ruling about workers and zero hours makes this the only legal option.
Of course, some will say that this is just an oversight and actually, on-call is just fine. For we are ruled by the omniscient well capable of thinking through second and third order effects of their actions. Well, obviously we are, we’d not allow them to have such power if they were not that capable and omniscient, would we?
Right?
Tim Worstall