Hopefully, most of us may never need to call upon the services our local fire brigade but, if we did, it would be reassuring to know they had the equipment to cope with our emergency.
Rye fire station is currently an on-call fire station with two pumping appliances, the fourth busiest on-call fire station in East Sussex covering a predominantly remote area, the population being widely dispersed. However, proposals are currently being discussed to downgrade the fire station to one pump, resulting (if other fires happened at the same time) in substantially longer response times for supporting crews.
These cuts could cost lives and, as a town, we know from recent events such as the devastating fire at the George Hotel last year how important the fire service is to us all in Rye and the local area. We are reminded that Rye fire station is in close proximity of Lydd airport, major holiday camps at Pett, Winchelsea and Camber, the nuclear power station at Dungeness and one upper-tier COMAH (Control of Major Accident Hazards) site.
The proposed cuts across East Sussex would see the loss of up to 30 full time posts and up to 60 retained firefighter posts and all of this is going on in the middle of a global pandemic.
But the tables have been turned around and it’s now our turn to act for the fire service and pledge our support to the current Save Our Service campaign by signing a petition to stop these life threatening cuts. Full details can be found on here. Alternatively you can lobby our local MP, Sally Ann Hart by emailing her on sallyann.hart@parliament.uk.
Image Credits: Nick Forman , Rye News library .
The petition page link is missing on the change.org website can you address this please. I did try searching for Save Our Services but couldn’t find it.