Highlands and Islands Fire Brigade

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We visited Scotland in July 2000. All of the fire brigades in the United Kingdom, which includes Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England, follow the same basic set of rules and regulations, although obviously different environments make each fire brigade unique. The countryside of the Northern Highlands is some very remote and rough terrain. One could travel for hours without seeing another soul - yet in some of the furthest reaches of the land, we found the occasional house! The fire brigade here faces some very unique challenges with an incredibly sprawling district and often difficult road and weather conditions.

The firefighters here were very friendly and more than willing to take time out of their busy day to show me around and chat. In fact, I think they may have asked more questions of me about firefighting in the United States than I asked of them!

The Inverness Fire Station is the headquarters for the Highlands and Islands Fire Brigade. They have about 200 full-time (or, as they call them, "whole-time") staff, and about 1000 "retained" and "auxiliary" firefighters. Retained firefighters are part-timers who are on-call and respond to pagers. They are paid a retaining fee (hence their name!) on an annual basis, plus they receive pay-per-call and an hourly rate. The auxiliary firefighters are equivalent to our volunteers, but they also get pay-per-call and an hourly rate that is considerably higher than the average here.

The Highlands and Islands Fire Brigade have one truck with extrication equipment on it stationed in Inverness, and it may travel anywhere in the district to a call. Having to drive as far as 150 miles through the rough terrain and narrow roads of the Northern Highlands, they said it could take several hours to get to an incident from the station!

The population in Inverness is about 80,000, and that main station runs approximately 12,000 calls per year. And what makes that REALLY amazing is that the firefighters do not run medical calls! Paramedics and firefighters are in two completely separate organizations, unlike around here where a fire truck and an ambulance may live in the same house. They are unionized, and the unions fought and defeated an attempt to push medical training on the firefighters because they did not want to take jobs away from the paramedics.

Their training requirements are very stringent. They have a 16 week academy for new hires, similar to around here - but then they are on probation for TWO years, and not considered a "qualified firefighter" until they have been on the line for FOUR years! Six to eight years is considered an aggressive time frame in which to become a station officer, or the equivalent of our Captain.