{"id":7033,"date":"2018-03-28T10:46:12","date_gmt":"2018-03-28T08:46:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=7033"},"modified":"2018-03-28T10:51:02","modified_gmt":"2018-03-28T08:51:02","slug":"a-modern-fire-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/7033\/","title":{"rendered":"A Modern Fire Service"},"content":{"rendered":"

From The Guardian<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

The fire service played \u201cno meaningful role\u201d in the aftermath of the\u00a0ManchesterArena bombing because they arrived two hours late, a review of the response to the attack has found.<\/p>\n

Although two fire crews were stationed close enough to the Arena to hear the explosion, they were sent to a rendezvous point three miles away amid fears that there was a marauding terror attack and they would not be safe, the review concluded.<\/p>\n

When they eventually arrived at the Arena, more than two hours after Salman Abedi detonated his suicide bomb on Monday 22 May 2017, the visibly frustrated fire officers were not immediately allowed on to the concourse to help because of communication errors between \u201crisk-averse\u201d officers in charge.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Is anyone surprised by this? Managers obsessing over risk assessments and preventing the rank and file doing the job they signed up for is normal for Britain’s emergency services these days, is it not?<\/p>\n

Dawn Docx, the interim chief fire officer of\u00a0Greater Manchester\u00a0Fire and Rescue Service (GMFRS) said she apologised unreservedly for the failures in the previous leadership of the service at the time of last May\u2019s outrage.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She’s interim because the person in charge at the time, one Peter O’Reilly who was on \u00a3155k per year, has now retired, keeping his pension with no action taken against him. Why not, I hear you ask?<\/p>\n

Asked if any officers had been disciplined for their handling of events, Docx said: \u201cWe are very much a learning organisation. We are not seeking to go down a discipline route.\u201d<\/p>\n

Andy Burnham said no one individual should bear all the responsibility for failures and no one should be \u201cscapegoated\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How very modern. Time was, people atop organisations were paid vast sums of money precisely because they were accountable when something went wrong. Nowadays, nobody is responsible and nobody should be “scapegoated”. Yet the vast sums of money remain. Nice work for some, eh? Here’s<\/a> a little about Docx, who appears to have been named by Microsoft:<\/p>\n

Dawn joined GMFRS in 2017. She\u00a0started her career in the fire and rescue service in her home county of Cumbria, where she specialised in finance, going on to become Head of Corporate Services. From there, she joined North Wales as an Assistant Chief Fire Officer in 2006 and was promoted to the role of \u2018Dep\u2019 in 2009.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Specialised in finance, eh? That’ll help when tackling blazes. So who else is on the leadership team of the Greater Manchester Fire Service:<\/p>\n

Dave\u00a0Keelan<\/strong>
\nDirector of Emergency Response<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since 2008 Dave has worked as a Borough Manager in Manchester, as Head of Prevention and Head of Operational Training for the Service, and is currently leading a team investigating the tragic death of Firefighter Stephen Hunt at an operational incident on Oldham Street in Manchester in July 2013.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Okay, he at least sounds as though he knows one end of a hose from another.<\/p>\n

Shelley Wright\u00a0<\/strong>
\nDirector of Corporate Communications<\/strong><\/p>\n

Shelley holds the only board-level communications role in any Fire and Rescue Service in the UK. She took up her post in October 2010 and has delivered a vision to ensure that local people in Greater Manchester have more access to information about the work of GMFRS and, most importantly, to get safety messages into people’s homes and businesses, improving and protecting lives through awareness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If no other fire service in the UK needs a board-level communications person, what makes Manchester so different? Who is she related to? Here’s the pic which accompanies her bio:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

They’re not even trying, are they?<\/p>\n

Gwynne Williams<\/strong>
\nDeputy Monitoring Officer<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gwynne undertook her training and qualified as a Solicitor in a private practice in 1989. In October 1990 she joined Wigan Council as an in-house solicitor and shortly after began working with Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service specialising in the area of Fire Safety.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ve gone through the leadership of a number of organisations over the past year, and I notice there seems to be no requirement to have any knowledge or experience of the organisation’s core activities to earn a position.<\/p>\n

Andrea Heffernan<\/strong>
\nDirector of Corporate Support<\/strong><\/p>\n

Andrea is a member of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy, and prior to joining GMFRS worked for KPMG as an Internal Auditor and for a Home Care Charity in Wakefield before joining GMFRS in 1997 as Business Accountant.\u00a0 She has\u00a0 worked in a number of roles within the Finance team until she was appointed as Head of Finance and Technical Services in June 2008. Andrea took up the role of Director of Corporate Support in December 2015.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m slightly surprised that a city’s fire brigade needs a director of corporate support. I ought to be surprised they’ve handed overseeing the provision of technical services to firemen to an accountant, but I’m not.<\/p>\n

To their credit, Greater Manchester Fire service hasn’t filled its webpages with endless screeds on the importance of diversity, but a search brings up plenty of documents pandering to the idea. This “inclusivity strategy” document (.pdf<\/a>) contains a particularly illuminating line (page 9):<\/p>\n

Since 2003 we have fundamentally changed what we do and we are no longer a purely responsive service waiting for emergencies to occur.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This was written in 2012, and we can probably assume things have developed such that the word “purely” can be deleted from the above. It would explain why, when an emergency\u00a0did<\/em> occur, you didn’t know what to do. Still, lessons learned, eh? I’m sure Peter O’Reilly mulls them over every day, when he’s not figuring out how to spend his amassed earnings and generous pension.<\/p>\n

(Thanks to reader Morteen for the heads-up on this.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From The Guardian: The fire service played \u201cno meaningful role\u201d in the aftermath of the\u00a0ManchesterArena bombing because they arrived two hours late, a review of the response to the attack has found. Although two fire crews were stationed close enough … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[42],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7033"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7033"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7033\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7038,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7033\/revisions\/7038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}