The fire service has moved to clarify the situation in Glen Innes after the decision to cut the post of the permanent officer at the station.
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Captain Earl Sharman of the Glen Innes Fire Brigade said that misinformation was flying around Facebook so that a cut in a post was being read as a cut in the service.
“We want to reassure the people of the town that the station remains functioning. There are 17 firefighters on call 24/7,” he said.
“There are no changes in the response of members of the Glen Innes fire station to any emergency which we are called to,” he added.
The situation is that the post of a permanent officer has closed for the first time in more than a century. He was stationed through the day at the fire station and would be available to give advice.
If there was a fire, the permanent officer would call in the stand-by officers from their other jobs or occupations. These stand-by officers remain and will deal with calls just as before.
Response time to an emergency would be no different because these are the same people who would have answered the call previously.
Captain Sharman said that one difference the change made was that now he would have to deal with the paperwork. In the past, that was done by the permanent officer at the station during the day.
This could be burdensome, though since he was retired it wouldn’t be as difficult as it would be for an on-call firefighter with a full-time job.
He urged the public to think ahead about things like applying for Permits to Burn, in particular.
In the past, people would be able to call into the fire station as they happened to be passing, but in future might well need an appointment, so a call to arrange one would be appreciated by Captain Sharman.
The management of Fire & Rescue NSW said that there would be no change to response times.
It has argued that the role of a full-time officer at the station came from a different era when transport was slower. Its view was that centralising resources in big towns, with 24-hour staffing, now made sense.