The leader of Ashfield District Council fears "lives will be lost" if the area's fire station is not fully re-opened, as a consultation on doing so closes. Ashfield Fire Station lost its full-time crew in 2018 and since that time, it has been operating from 8am until 6pm with 12 full-time firefighters, then relying on on-call firefighters outside of that timeframe.
Despite praising the "excellent" work of on-call firefighters, Jason Zadrozny says they are hampered by geography. But returning to full-time operation is now one of the recommendations in a consultation on a re-structuring of Nottinghamshire Fire and Rescue Service's operations, which closes on December 23.
The service at the time of the 2018 arrangements said the alternative would have been redundancies or station closures, but it now says that it could invest £660,000 in returning Ashfield to a full-time station. This sum of money is the amount that the service says would be saved by removing the night-time shift from West Bridgford instead.
