New fire stations will allow more women to join brigade

COMMISSIONER of the Jamaica Fire Brigade Stewart Beckford is hopeful that the construction of new fire stations will increase the number of women in the brigade.

Of the 1,840 firefighters in the brigade currently, only 12 per cent of them (225) are women. This, Beckford says, is due largely to the fact that the older fire stations were not built to house women, so the brigade has to cap the number of women it recruits.

“Our constraint is the fact that our facilities were constructed in the early days. There weren’t many women in the fire service doing actual firefighting. They may have been in administrative work and so on, and actually went home everyday. And as you know, firefighters are stationed 24 hours per day, seven days per week,” Beckford told reporters and editors at the Jamaica Observer Monday Exchange last week.

In the decades that followed, however, women have become increasingly interested in firefighting.

“There are times during the recruiting process that you will find women turning up in greater numbers, or even in equal numbers as the men,” he noted, mentioning that the women are very competent.

“Once we do the recruiting exercise, most times the women will outshine the men, but we are constrained with the numbers we can take.

“We always try to ensure that there is a mix going into training school, where at least 10 per cent of the recruits going in are women,” he added.

The main reason why more women are not taken into the brigade is that many of the fire stations do not have adequate boarding facilities for women.

“[The main issue] is dormitory space, because we are stationed 24 hours a day and we don’t want to house men and women together,” he said.

He added that the brigade has tried to adjust to accommodate more women where it could.

“What we have done over time to be able to accommodate the numbers that we have now is to reconfigure where we can, but most of the facilities are so small that we can’t do anything to them,” he lamented.

“For example at Half-Way-Tree it’s a very small facility, but we’ve managed to seal off a space there where we can house maybe two or so women per shift.”

Beckford expects that the construction of some new fire stations across the country will bring the percentage of women in the brigade from 10 up to 15 or 20 per cent.

“It’s going to take time because of the fact that we don’t have the facilities now. The stations that are to be built will assist a great deal. So we’ll be able to take on more women in, say, St James, St Mary, St Thomas, and even St Catherine as well.”

At least three new facilities will be opened in the near future, which will be more female-friendly, Beckford announced.

“There are three stations that are slated to come on stream between this year and next year,” the commissioner said.

“They are Barnett Street in St James, Port Maria in St Mary, and Yallahs in St Thomas. These are not new stations per se; they are replacements for old stations.”

The fire service in Jamaica was established in 1871. The first substation in Half-Way-Tree was built in the late 1930s, while the headquarters at York Park was established in 1944. At the time, the other parishes had separate brigades.