A call through the eyes of: North West Fire Control

Lancashire Fire and Rescue Serviced transferred their call handling operations over to North West Fire Control in May 2014. Since then they have taken hundreds of thousands of emergency 999 calls from across the North West region. Laura Martin is a call handler who over the Christmas period took a call where a family of eight were trapped in a house fire. Here she talks about that incident and what it is like to be a fire control operator.

[@CalMusicCovers]

I remember going to NW Fire control and I was allowed to listen to emergency calls. Had to be very quite :)

[@NeilM01989]

Great job Laura 👍🙂

[@nevillemason6791]

This centre handles calls from several counties when formally each had a control room and is a recipe for disaster. With no local knowledge and frequently several roads with same name in the same town errors and delays are inevitable. Cornwall control room handle overflow calls at busy times for West Yorkshire. They recently sent fire engines to the wrong address (7 miles away).

[@livestream3946]

Rubbish the stats prove how well NWFC works

[@scooby1992]

Fair point Neville and Fire Controls do a great job whether covering one county , two counties or even more lie NWFC , but since 2006 Ambulance Services in England cover many counties and handle many more calls than Fire Control rooms and it generally works well . Local knowledge is still important but arguably less important with modern technology and mapping systems .