Urgency given to rural fire-fighting

Press, 25 January 1989, Page 1

Urgency given to rural fire-fighting

By

OLIVER RIDDELL

at Parliament

The Government needs to make sure that rural and forest fire-fighting do not fall between the cracks of departmental restructuring, says the Prime Minister, Mr Lange. He said the Cabinet yesterday had ordered an urgent review of the provision of fire-fighting services in rural areas.

Officials had been instructed by the Cabinet to prepare urgently the terms of reference for this review.

In the meantime, contingency plans had been made if the rural and forest fires in the Canterbury area seemed to be getting out of control, Mr Lange said. These included bringing in defence personnel if necessary, if the number of fire-fighters available in the Canterbury area was insufficient.

Last year he had asked the coordinator of domestic and external security to look into the question of rural and forest fires because there had been articles and reports saying there could be

trouble in the rural areas. This followed from the new levels of responsibility of the Fire Service, Forest Corp, Defence, and the like. The Cabinet had considered the director’s report yesterday and found that matters were not bad at present but there was a need to be prepared for- things not being good in the future, Mr Lange said. There was no legal obligation on urban fire services to fight rural fires, although the ethos of being a fire-fighter meant that they did. Forest Corp had inherited a situation from the old Forest Service where its resources were available for rural fires, whether in private forest, scrub, grass, or whatever. The new custodians had to take a less charitable view.

“So we’ve got to make sure we’ve got a proper rural fire service,” Mr Lange said. In the meantime, the Government had also wanted to make sure that in tinder-dry Canterbury it had the resources to cope with a big fire.

“At Cabinet level we initiated with the Ministry of Defence an inquiry as to what levels of fire retardants were held in the Christchurch area,” he said. “We determined before Christmas that they were insufficient and we flew stocks down to Christchurch.

“The next challenge,” Mr Lange said, “is to make sure that there are sufficient people in the Ministry of Defence available to fight a fire, and that might mean we have to consider ways of bringing people back from Exercise Golden Fleece if necessary if the numbers are not sufficient in the Canterbury area.” Changes in the structure of Government departments had led to concern about rural firefighting. “People don’t join the Defence Forces to fight fires and they don’t work for a forestry company to fight fires in grasslands,” he said.

“Urban fire people don’t have a mandate to fight country fires, and the new art of government is to make sure no-one actually falls between all the cracks.”