Essex County Fire and Rescue Service
ECFRS is one of the country’s largest fire and rescue services. Serving the geographical County of Essex, we provide fire and rescue related safety and emergency response services. We have 18 fire stations with permanent crews and 33 fire stations crewed by on-call or retained firefighters. In addition to these 51 fire stations we operate an emergency control room that deals with calls for help and mobilises resources to attend incidents.
In an emergency, you expect your fire service to respond quickly to help you. We will do that but we also do a lot more to keep people and businesses safe, and to prevent emergencies happening in the first place. We believe that waiting until a crisis occurs and requires an emergency response is the most expensive way of dealing with problems and may only have a limited benefit.
We have been very successful in reducing the risks to our communities from fire and other emergencies. We are proud of our ongoing work to prevent emergencies as well as our co-operation with other organisations in Essex and beyond.
ECFRS is the statutory rescue service in the event of road traffic collisions (RTCs) and is called out to attend an increasing number of RTCs on the roads of Essex (1,286 in 2014/15 compared with 1,212 in 2013/14). We are passionate and committed to help achieve a reduction in the number of RTCs occurring on our roads.
In addition to our essential emergency response and rescue role, ECFRS also has powers to seek to prevent RTCs occurring in the first place. We do this through a range of education and engagement activities in collaboration with our colleagues in SERP, and through the management of a number of specific RTC reduction products/resources, including:
Essex FireBikes
FireBike is our dedicated motorcycle safety product through which we engage positively with motorcyclists and their pillions on a range of safety and related issues. FireBike also delivers further training to motorcyclists through the ‘Better Biking’ and ‘Advanced Machine Skills’ courses.
Community Wheels
Community Wheels is a multi-media presentation vehicle used to engage and educate on road safety issues, particularly for young and newly qualified drivers, focusing on the ‘fatal 4’ causes of RTCs: speeding, drink and drug driving, seatbelt wearing and distraction. Community Wheels serves as a partnership platform for multi-agency events/activities.
Essex Fire Car
The Fire Car, a Ford Focus ST3, kindly donated by Ford, is used to engage positively with drivers aged 19 -35 years – predominantly male, cruiser car or ‘performance car’ drivers – at various locations around Essex, particularly where street racing is reported to occur. The Fire Car is also used for wider road safety education and to support other SERP activities and events.
Ford Driving Simulator
Our driving simulator, located at Waltham Abbey Fire Station, is used to provide driving and road risk/consequence education for young people. Built, developed and donated by Ford, the simulator comprises a modified Ford Fiesta car body with a state of the art computer simulator linked to panoramic image projectors. The educational experience for those using it is fully immersive.