About Avon Fire & Rescue Service
Avon Fire & Rescue Service (AF&RS) provides emergency and
protection services to the communities of Bath and North East
Somerset, Bristol, North Somerset and South
Gloucestershire.
We are committed to providing a safer place for people to live,
work and visit, covering an area of 134,753 hectares and a
population of over one million. In 2007/08
we attended 17,091 incidents.
While firefighting has traditionally been at the forefront
of our work, the role of a modern fire and rescue service has
increased to cover the core functions of 'Protecting, Preventing
and Responding'.
As a result we now have a wider remit – promoting community
safety through events and education work, alongside attending a
range of incidents and emergencies from road traffic collisions and
fires, to flooding and chemical spills.
We work closely with the other emergency services, as well
as external agencies such as the 'RSPCA' when animals are
trapped and 'Avon & Somerset Search and Rescue' when local
climbers are in trouble.
Our main objectives, which are set by the Government, are to reduce
the number of deaths from accidental fires in the home by 20
percent and the number of deliberate fires by 10 percent - by 2010.
This is a figure we are well on the way to achieving through our
community work and education initiatives.
By promoting safety messages to local residents and encouraging
people to have working smoke alarms we aim to cut the risk of fire
developing in the first place. Find out more about this work in the
Your Safety section
Our Headquarters (HQ) is based in Bristol city centre and we
have 23 fire stations spread throughout the area. Where’s my local fire
station?
We also have nine Community Safety Centres (CSCs) which provide
free safety advice, Internet access and meeting room facilities.
Our CSCs can be found at our Bristol HQ, Bath, Bedminster,
Keynsham, Southmead, Speedwell, Weston-super-Mare and Yate fire
stations, as well as at Symes Avenue in Hartcliffe. Find out more
about the Community
Safety Centres
Our 999 emergency calls are answered by Fire Service
Control, based at Lansdown in Bath. Our Fire Control
Operators deal with thousands of emergency calls each year - in
2007/08 we answered 26,074 .
Our staff
We employ over 1,000 people. This figure is currently made up
of:
Firefighters on the Wholetime Duty System: 643 (39 of these
also provide some cover as Retained Duty Firefighters when not
on duty as a Wholetime firefighter)
Firefighters on the Retained Duty System: 222
Control Room staff: 37
Total number of operational staff: 865 (+ 37 Control)
= 902
Total number of support staff: approx 167
How are our fire stations crewed?
In the urban areas of Bristol, Bath and Weston-super-Mare
the fire stations are crewed 24 hours a day, seven days a week by
firefighters working on the Wholetime Duty System.
Wholetime firefighters work a shift system of four watches - Red,
Blue, White and Green, with each watch working two day shifts and
two night shifts followed by four rest days.
In more rural areas such as Thornbury, Yatton and Radstock, the
fire stations are crewed by firefighters working on the Retained
Duty System.
Working on a shift basis, retained firefighters live or work within
five minutes of the station and are paged by Fire Control when
needed at an incident.
Our wholetime stations of Bath and Weston-super-Mare are also
supported by a retained crew who are brought in during busy
periods.
Support staff
As a modern fire and rescue service, we do not just employ
operational staff, but also many support staff, who carry out
vital roles for the fire and rescue service. We currently
employ around 150 support staff in a range of professional,
technical and administrative roles.
These roles include: strategic planning, performance management,
information services, media liaison and communication, mapping and
data management, statistical analysis, social marketing, health and
safety, fleet (vehicle) management, web and graphic design, human
resources.