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Water and Flood Rescue

All appliances carry lifejackets and throw lines to provide crews to make themselves safe and provide a limited (bankside) rescue capability.

Crews have also received some very basic awareness training. However it has been identified that this has some limitations and potential weaknesses.

Water Policy

A strategy is currently being worked on by a group of specialists under the direction of the Civil Protection Manager, to provide a more comprehensive ‘Water Policy’. A range of policy options have been identified and some of these have been decided and set in motion:

Put additional lifejackets on all appliances
Put additional throw lines on all appliances
Put inflatable hose lines on all appliances
Deliver enhanced water awareness training to all operational personnel

This policy should allow all crews to recognise dangers from water related incidents, be safer and also have greater capability of achieving a bankside rescue. This will help prevent crews from being tempted to enter water for an ill-advised rescue attempt.

MIRG response

An opportunity is also being taken to utilise some of the assets Hampshire has for MIRG response to respond to flood evacuation operations. By adding further equipment to the MIRG vehicle and delivering specific training to the MIRG personnel they will be capable of extended flood evacuation operations that have been required in the past and are expected again in the future.

Swift Water

The issue yet to be resolved is the need or otherwise to have a full technical ‘swift water rescue’ capability. Hampshire’s risk profile does not identify any specific trends for swift water incidents. However we do have the occasional incident and there is an anticipated increase in incidents caused by spate conditions (weather and tides).

The two problems that this type of risk poses are

that it will be difficult to provide an effective operational response to actually save many lives (where would the team be based?) and
the cost of providing such a specialist capability is very high compared to the benefits gained.

Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service will plan the response to any major flooding incident and expect personnel to operate near moving water. Personnel are expected to

carry out evacuations in static flood waters
mobilise to water rescue incidents
assist at animal rescues near or in water.

All these situations could make it easy to envisage that a fire-fighter could at some time get into trouble and need rescuing. So there is a need for a higher level of water rescue capability but how it can be delivered cost effectively will be a challenge.