WHEN residents in rural Jamaica call Jamaica Fire Brigade (JFB) to seek help from the emergency service to extinguish a blaze they typically have to wait 30 to 45 minutes before a unit arrives, says commissioner of JFB Stewart Beckford.

“It’s a function of the number of fire stations you have in the parish, and, of course, how far apart those fire stations are from each other. On average, in the rural areas, depending on where the incident is occurring, it can take us anywhere between 30 and 45 minutes to get to a scene,” said Beckford.

“In instances like those, when we get there it’s mostly cooling down operations that we are going there to do — and this is not comforting to us as firefighters. We want to save lives and protect people’s property but sometimes the conditions do not lend [themselves] to a rapid response because of distance, terrain, and of course our station footprint,” he told the Jamaica Observer.

The commissioner shared that currently there are 34 fire stations across the island, inclusive of two marine stations — one in Kingston and the other in Montego Bay. However, some rural parishes like Trelawny and Hanover only have one or two stations.

Additionally, he said that the placement of the units, especially in rural parishes, creates a separate issue.

“Historically, most of our stations are located in coastal towns, along the coastal belt of the country. If you look at Morant Bay in the east, all the way back to Savanna-la-Mar in the west and coming back to St Elizabeth into Kingston, most of our fire stations are located on the coastal belt,” said Beckford.

“To get into the interior of the country we have to sometimes travel on roads that are winding, sometimes narrow, and of course the condition of the road is not that good, and this will play a part in how quickly we get to an incident,” he explained.

“The thinking now is we need to look at getting smaller pumper units that can navigate these narrow streets. The discussion is now taking place with a view of procuring what we refer to as mini pumpers, in the short to medium term, to fill some of these gaps that exist out there where the larger trucks are having difficulty accessing,” he said.

There are 86 firefighting units across the 32 stations.

Commissioner Beckford shared that in Kingston and St Andrew there are seven fire stations, with response times ranging from three to 20 minutes or more depending on the circumstances.

“Most times of the day there is a large volume of traffic in the streets and so that will also play a role in how quickly we can get to a scene. Unfortunately, there are no emergency lanes on our roads to accommodate whether it is fire, police, or ambulance so we have to navigate the streets with other road users — and fire units are very large. It’s not easy to sometimes get through the traffic as quickly as we’d want,” he explained.

The commissioner said that even though the Kingston and St Andrew region has the most fire stations, most of the stations only have one unit because they are too small to accommodate multiple units. These include the Half-Way-Tree, Trench Town, Rollington Town, Port Royal, and Stony Hill fire stations. York Park Fire Station has multiple units.

Additionally, he said that some rural areas also have only one unit at their fire stations.

“In the rural parishes — at the division headquarters — we tend to have more than one unit but at the substations — because of the size of most of those stations — they can only accommodate one pumper. In some instances we will put a pumper and a tanker for support but it is a function of the space,” said the commissioner.

“A lot of our stations were built in the 50s and so on when we had much smaller units. The units are a lot larger now and they take up more space — and that is one of the challenges we face,” he explained.

“For example, Half-Way-Tree accommodates one pumper because it’s a small station. It couldn’t accommodate two trucks; only one truck could be assigned there. If that unit is out responding to an incident in, maybe let’s say Duhaney Park, and there is an incident on Constant Spring Road we would now have to look and see which is the nearest station, and in that case it would be Trench Town,” he said, adding that this would lengthen the response time.

“Ideally, we probably could do with maybe one or two stations in addition to what exists in most divisions across the fire brigade. There are areas that still [don’t] have appropriate coverage because of the distance,” he said.

The commissioner noted that while the current resources are not sufficient, the current demand is met 90 per cent of the time.

However, he said that with increased development taking place across the island, “the demand that is placed on the service grows, and then there will be a need for additional fire units”.

“What has worked in our favour, notwithstanding the exponential development taking place in some divisions, is that a lot of these developments are taking place close to the coastline, and again that’s where most of our fire stations are located. What we have been doing to sort of make sure that we are keeping pace with development, in terms of our ability to respond, is to be sure that we have a full complement of staff and that our units are properly functioning and properly maintained,” he said.

“We try to make sure that we think outside the box because we know that the resources are just not there to set down a fire station where every development is taking place. One of the things that we are looking at as well is building low-budget stations so that we can build more stations with less money, less strain on the Government’s [coffers],” he shared.

He stressed that the Government is committed to increasing the resources of the brigade, noting that they have signalled this commitment with the build-out of a station in Ulster Spring, Trelawny, and other developments.

Minister of Local Government and Community Development Desmond McKenzie, in his contribution to the 2024/25 Budget Debate in the House of Representatives in May, shared that the Government is investing millions of dollars in building out fire stations across the island.

Rehabilitation works have also started at Half-Way-Tree Fire Station and the Annotto Bay station in St Mary.