Climate change fears spark £3.2m investment in new Norfolk fire kit

Dan Grimmer in the Norwich Evening News (UK): Fire chiefs have revealed how they are having to spend £3.2m on the fire engine equivalents of “a Swiss Army Knife” because climate change is causing more floods and heath blazes in Norfolk.

The county’s fire and rescue service is investing millions of pounds in a dozen new fire appliances because the traditional two wheel drive vehicles are no longer always up to the increasingly challenging jobs which firefighters are called out to.

Fire chiefs say climate change means cases of flooding and fires on Norfolk heath land in drier summers are on the increase. And that means the service needs vehicles more suitable for coping with such incidents, according to fire bosses.

That’s why 10 new 4x4 engines are being brought in, along with two heavy rescue pumps, which help deal with road crashes. Norfolk’s assistant chief fire officer Roy Harold said: “What we wanted was a Swiss Army Knife of fire engines, something with the capacity and flexibility to cope with the challenges we face.

...“We have done a great deal of work mapping risk patterns and the changing risk profile in our county. These 10 fire engines are much better suited to deal with incidents involving flooding, heath land and forestry.”...

A Volvo FL6 Fire Engine for the Hampshire Fire & Rescue Serive, England. Shot by deltaalpha24, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license