Fire Engines Photos

TFD volunteers do actually respond as first due to a lot of fire calls, especially in areas which are not close to one of TFD's 80 full time fire stations, because they can often get to an incident more quickly.

Typically they respond in large numbers, and focus on protecting exposures to inhibit fire spread.

This is a key tactic in the narrow, congested side streets and alleys, where many buildings are mainly timber construction and closely jammed together.

It is not unusual to see half a dozen at a first alarm structure fire, in addition to units from the nearest full time station(s)...

There are more than 200 volunteer community fire companies in Tokyo, staffed by unpaid on-call personnel who both live and work close to their station.

It is a model which is repeated all over Japan and in many cities on the European and American continents. It is so commonplace because it provides very high standards of emergency response which could not be achieved at an affordable cost with only paid personnel.

In these days of fire service cutbacks in the UK, it is an obvious solution which may become the only alternative in Britain too...

Added by Rob Johnson on 25 September 2019.

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