Why was Leura fire station closed during Woodford bushfire?
The Blue Mountains community is enraged over the closure of a local Fire and Rescue fire station during NSW’s unprecedented bushfire emergency. High fire danger was current and the Woodford bushfire was still burning.
Penrith
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THE Blue Mountains community is enraged over the closure of a local Fire and Rescue fire station during NSW’s unprecedented bushfire emergency.
Leura Fire and Rescue NSW Station was closed while firefighters continued to work to protect residential properties in Woodford following last Friday’s distressing 77-hectare bushfire in Riches Ave.
“Leura, an on-call (retained) fire station, was temporarily offline between 8am and 2pm on Saturday,” confirmed a Fire and Rescue NSW (FRNSW) spokeswoman.
“This decision was based on an assessment of the ability of other fire stations in the area to provide full coverage in the event of an emergency call.”
The risk of catastrophic fire in the Woodford area this week saw residents flee their homes including the Thompson family, who feared for the safety of their month-old baby Sakura.
“The fire was quite close to us on Riches Ave and Park Rd,” Mr Thompson said.
“I didn’t want to take a gamble, so we grabbed the baby, grabbed our passports and went.”
At 4.55pm today there were 68 bush and grass fires burning across the state, with one at “emergency warning” level – the highest level of Bush Fire Alert.
Bushfires at Riches Ave, Woodford, in Cliff Dr, Katoomba, and in Raymond Rd, Springwood, are now “under control”, meaning a fire is at a stage where firefighting resources are only required for patrol purposes and major reignition is unlikely.
The FRNSW spokeswoman stressed Leura Fire Station received no calls during its closure on Saturday.
The ‘Stop NSW Fire Station Closures’ Facebook page claimed in a post shared over 4700 times that Leura Fire Station was closed so FRNSW “could try and stay within the reduced budget provided by the NSW Government”.
“High fire danger was current and the Woodford bushfire was still burning – it was not appropriate to TOL it (make the station ‘temporarily off line’) that day,” said the site’s administrator, a FRNSW firefighter of nearly 20 years who did not wish to be named.
Shadow Minister for Emergency Services and Blue Mountains state Labor MP, Trish Doyle, said the Berejiklian Liberal Government has cut $12.9 million from the operational budget of FRNSW.
“This comes on top of rolling cuts to staffing costs through a Treasury-mandated ‘labour expense cap’, which this year hit $21 million,” she said.
“In this context, when crews have been working around the clock, if there is no money for overtime then the station has nobody left to crew it – so it gets taken offline.”
FRNSW’s spokeswoman said the service has “an established practice of managing all of its on-call fire stations through risk-based readiness” and “it is not uncommon for FRNSW crews and resources to be deployed outside their fire districts for both incidents and training however emergency response is always maintained within these communities”.
She said FRNSW was “committed to keeping communities safe”.
A NSW Government spokeswoman said in 2019-20 NSW Government will spend more than $1.7 billion to combat emergencies and disasters, “committing an unprecedented $105 million in extra funding to enhance rescue capabilities across the state”.
“The NSW Rural Fire Service will be receiving a record $541 million in 2019-20, an increase of 12.9 per cent from funding announced in the 2018-19 budget,” she said.
“Fire and Rescue NSW will be receiving a record $826 million in 2019-20, an increase of 2.7 per cent from funding announced in the 2018-19 budget.”