FOCUS
Battle ready F
OLLOWING THE signifi cant moorland wildfi res in Greater Manchester and Lancashire, covering more than 27 square kilometres,
a large scale national response was put in place by the National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC). The NFCC has a specialist wildfi re group which sits under its National Operations Coordination Committee. The expertise of this group was utilised to offer expert advice to incident command teams, while wildfi re experts gave professional and operational assistance at the scene. This included more than 150 fi refi ghters from in excess of 20 fi re and rescue services (FRSs) from across the UK, including specialist resources such as high volume pumping units, 4x4s, drones, helicopters and all terrain vehicles. Resourcing at the incident was supported by the National Resilience Assurance Team (NRAT) and National Resilience Fire Control (NRFC), along with NFCC Tactical Advisers and its specialist wildfire group, all offering expertise to Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service (GMFRS’s) and Lancashire FRS’s (LFRS’s) incident command team. National Resilience also had an Enhanced Logistic Support (ELS) capability in attendance to assist with the coordination of the assets.
24 SEPTEMBER 2018
www.frmjournal.com
Recent wildfires swept across moorland in north west England, requiring a national response that included the first deployment of a wildfire resilience capability. Paul Hedley reports
They were all working to the nationally adopted Joint Emergency Services Interoperability Principles (JESIP), designed to ensure that emergency services work together to an agreed set of principles aimed at keeping the public safe.
Capability development
Since 2016, the NFCC Wildfire Group has been working in earnest on the development of a national Wildfi re Tactical Adviser (WTA) capability network to provide better support to FRSs dealing with protracted, significant, complex or multiple wildfire events. For services which have a considerable
wildfire risk and threat within their areas, and which deal with complex wildfi re events regularly, there was already a recognition and acknowledgement of the benefits that could be gained from having trained wildfi re specialists within their ranks. The offer that the NFCC Wildfi re Group wanted to provide was to be able to extend that expertise, knowledge and experience across the UK to FRSs that may not have as developed a wildfi re capability or capacity locally.
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