Wadebridge firefighters mobilised 95 times in one Cornish summer
A phone buzzes on a bedside table at two in the morning, and someone who was fast asleep five minutes ago is pulling on boots and heading for the door. Multiply that by 95 and you get a rough shape of the last three months at Wadebridge Community Fire Station.
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A summer measured in call-outs
Since the start of June, crews from the station have been mobilised to 95 incidents in just 92 days, an average of more than one call-out every single day for three months running. Broken down, June brought 27 incidents and July another 27, before August alone accounted for 41, nearly half the total landing in a single month as the dry spell wore on.
Fires, crashes and long days on the road
The photos shared alongside those figures give some sense of what the call-outs actually involved. There is a gorse fire being damped down against a hedge with the sea behind it, a combine harvester alight in the middle of a stubble field, a caravan burning fiercely against a darkening sky, and more than one car flipped onto its roof on the lanes around Wadebridge. Crews from the station have stood in scorched, smoke-filled fields alongside colleagues from other Cornwall stations this summer, working incidents that ran long past the point most people would call it a day.
Not just blue lights
Incidents are only one side of it. Alongside the 999 calls, the station’s crews have also turned out for a run of community events over the same three months, among them school visits, a Blue Light Day, the town’s raft race, the carnival, a cricket match and an open day. It is the kind of summer where the same crew might go from hosing down a gorse fire one afternoon to handing round ice creams and posing with the fire safety bear the next.
Your daily dose of Cornwall
News, events and goings on across the Duchy
The people who show up
Every one of those 95 responses depended on somebody being free to answer it. Wadebridge’s fire engines are crewed by on-call firefighters, people who hold down day jobs, run households and fit the fire service in around family and home life. When the pager goes, they drop what they are doing and head for the station, whether that means leaving a shift at work, a family dinner, or a bed in the middle of the night.
Over June, July and August, those crews put in what the station describes as countless hours of availability, on top of the calls they were actually sent to. There is no fixed shift pattern deciding when they are needed. Just a pager, and the same question every time it goes off: can you get there.
In pictures: three months on call
Wadebridge’s crews shared dozens of photos from the last three months, from wildfires and road crashes to the raft race and the carnival. Here is a selection of what the summer looked like from the inside.
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