£1 million to be spent on fire engines for Shropshire by 2019
Shropshire Fire and Rescue Service is to spend more than £1 million on buying new appliances, or refurbishing old ones, over the next three years.
In this financial year, the service will replace two appliances and a further three the year after.
Four of the appliances being replaced are currently at whole-time stations and will be passed on to retained stations, being refurbished at a cost of £10,000 each.
The first two will be bought at a cost of £512,500 from 2017 to 2018, with a further £768,750 for the extra three in 2018 to 2019.
The four older fire engines will be refurbished and converted to nine-seat capacity, which will have a total cost of £40,000.
On October 16, Much Wenlock Fire Station welcomed its new fire appliance.
It was the weekly drill night for the town’s 11 firefighters but also in attendance were the Mayor and Mayoress of Much Wenlock, members of Much Wenlock Town Council and Shropshire’s Deputy Chief Fire Officer.
Andy Johnson handed over the keys to the £225,000 Scania appliance to Watch Manager Alastair Humphries who said it would give the rural area around Much Wenlock greater resilience in an emergency.
The new appliance carries 3,000 litres of water, 1,200 litres more than the 13-year-old Denis fire engine it replaces.
There are longer hose reels which now extend to 80 metres instead of 60 metres for hard to reach incidents, cordless cutting equipment and a new improved thermal imaging camera to seek out hidden “hotspots” in a property fire.
A lighter generator can be carried by one firefighter as opposed to four needed for the older equipment and the new appliance seats nine instead of eight firefighters.
The plans are one of a number of capital programmes being undertaken by the service, with updates provided in a Financial Performance report for September 2017, which will go to its Strategy and Resources Committee on Thursday.
The report says: "The main area of activity in the last quarter has been IT infrastructure, which has seen expenditure of £125,000.
"This has been used to enhance resilience of the network and improve disaster recovery and business continuity with the introduction of a new enterprise solution.
" An equipment refresh has also been achieved. A total of £25,000 has also been spent on the schemes to refurbish retained stations."
