Command and Control - the operations and mobilising centre of Buckinghamshire Fire & Rescue Service - is based in a Control Room about a mile away from our headquarters.
The specially-trained team of 23, led by Station Manager Control Suzanne Connolly, works in four watches of five members to provide 24-hour cover.
Since it was all brought under one roof in 1970, Buckinghamshire Fire & Rescue Service’s Control Room has handled around 650,000 calls. It currently receives an average of more than 400 a week.
Fire Control deploys the service’s 563 firefighters and 42 specialist fire and rescue vehicles to a variety of emergency incidents - mainly fires and road accidents, but also a number of special service calls - in response to 999 calls. The number of incidents has averaged about 10,000 a year for the past 10 years - double the annual number 20 years ago.
Control staff also provide a number of support services to the rest of Buckinghamshire Fire & Rescue Service, including providing statistical data and acting as a central communication centre both internally and to external services.
A number of the calls we receive come from people who are, not surprisingly, highly distressed. We have to be able to calm them down so that we can quickly find out everything we need to know about the incident before mobilising our fire and rescue vehicles and firefighters.
In some cases, the calls come from people who are trapped in house fires. Once again, our specialist training enables us to maximise their chances of survival while our fire crews are on their way.
Before Command & Control centralised in Aylesbury, there were three divisional call-handling rooms in Aylesbury, Bletchley and High Wycombe.
Under plans published by the Government in 2003, Fire Control for Buckinghamshire and Milton Keynes will move to a regional centre in Hampshire, covering all nine fire authorities in the South East and serving a population of 8.5 million, in 2010. It will be one of nine regional control centres across England.
Control Room staff played a key role in our response to the Jurys Inn scaffold collapse incident in Milton Keynes in 2006.