About us

We provide emergency and protection services to the communities of Bath & North East Somerset, Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire.

We are committed to providing a safer place for people to live, work and visit across an area of 134,753 hectares and a population of over one million.

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 'preventing', 'protecting' and 'responding'.

A lot of our work now focuses on how we can prevent accidents and emergencies happening in the first place, as we believe this is the best way to protect our communities. We do this by providing advice and education through events, visits, campaigns and partnership working.

Alongside this work we also provide a '999' response service to 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.

Your fire stations

Our Headquarters is based in Portishead and we have 21 fire stations across the area.

We also have three Community Safety Centres (CSCs) which provide safety advice, internet access and meeting facilities free of charge to local groups. You can read more information about our CSCs here.

Our 999 emergency calls are answered by Fire Service Control, based at Lansdown in Bath. Each year we deal with several thousand emergency calls.

Our staff

We employ around 800 people; this includes around 500 Wholetime firefighters, 120 On-call firefighters, 35 Control staff and 120 Support Staff.

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. Each watch works two day shifts, followed by two night shifts, followed by four rest days.

In more rural areas the fire stations are crewed by firefighters working on the On-Call Duty System. On-Call firefighters live or work within five minutes of the station and are paged by Fire Control when they are needed at an incident.

Some of our Wholetime stations are also supported by a On-Call crew who are brought in during busy periods.

Support staff

As a modern fire and rescue service, we don’t just employ operational staff, but also support staff in a range of professional, technical and administrative roles that are essential to ensuring the effective running of the service.