Westmeath’s chief fire officer David Stuart has hit out at a recent report highlighting the mobilisation times of Westmeath’s fire brigade, saying it “does not compare like with like”.
The Services Indicators in Local Authorities 2007 report, published last week, revealed that at an average time of 6.3 minutes, Westmeath’s fire brigade had the third slowest mobilisation time of the country’s part time fire services. The report also found that the time it took Westmeath’s fire services to reach fire scenes last year showed a slight drop on 2006, with an average of 36.4 scenes attended within 10 minutes, compared to 38.2 per cent the previous year.
However, Mr Stuart told the Advertiser that factors such as the number of large urban areas in the county has an effect on mobilisation times, and that the report fails to take this into account.
“Some counties have a lot of rural areas, but in Westmeath 80 per cent of calls to the fire brigade are from either Athlone or Mullingar, and they get caught up in traffic. When you compare with Co Longford, for example, Longford town is not nearly as big as these towns.”
The ‘mobilisation time’ referred to in the report describes the length of time from when fire fighters are notified until when they leave the fire station, which includes the time taken for part-time fire fighters to travel to the station.
“There is a lot of development going on in Athlone and Mullingar, and traffic is a big issue for fire fighters trying to get to the fire station in the first place,” said Mr Stuart.
The report found that Sligo’s fire brigade mobilised in an average of 4.2 minutes, the fastest of the country’s part-time brigades. However, Mr Stuart pointed out that Sligo’s stations are organised differently from Westmeath’s, which would have an impact on their faster mobilisation times. “Sligo has day-manned stations, which are different to Westmeath’s part-time stations. The report is not comparing like with like. For example Athlone has 10 fire fighters, whereas other towns have 12 coming in, so they would get the first six to go out quicker. The time it takes to get to incidents also depends on where the incident is, and the report doesn’t take this into account either. It does give some sort of indication, but every county has different arrangements. This is why we are trying to get a national authority set up to standardise things,” he concluded.
