Councillor seeks clarity over house fire response

A councillor has called for clarification on how it was decided which crew was alerted first to a fire which destroyed two homes in Ballater at the weekend.

The local on-call crew from the town was at a wildfire near Huntly and the next nearest unit in Aboyne was unavailable due to staffing problems.

Aberdeenshire councillor Geva Blackett has raised questions about the order in which crews were sent. It took nearly 50 minutes for firefighters to get to the scene from Tomintoul - about 24 miles (38km) away.

The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) said it would always attend every emergency using the nearest available appliance.

It took the Tomintoul crew 49 minutes to arrive at the scene of the incident, followed by crews from Stonehaven (40 miles/64km away), Banchory (24 miles/38km) and Braemar (17 miles/27km).

All the fire stations in the area are operated by on-call firefighters who respond to incidents using a pager.

Nobody was injured in the incident, which destroyed two homes, one of them a council house.

However, independent councillor Ms Blackett said she had concerns about where some of the fire crews were coming from.

She said: "I have e-mailed one of the officers and asked for a bit of clarification.

"I'm sure there's a very good reason why Stonehaven came out before Banchory, but I'd like to know what that is."

Craig McGoldrick, assistant chief officer at SFRS, said: "We will always attend every emergency and mobilise the nearest available appliance to an incident using our standard mobilisation practices.

"We were alerted at 17:26 on Saturday 28 June, to reports of a fire affecting two properties on Swann Place, Ballater.

"Operations control mobilised three appliances to the scene from Tomintoul, Stonehaven and Banchory community fire stations."

He said that due to "repeat calls" another appliance was sent from Braemar.

"The Aboyne appliance was not available due to staffing at the time of this incident," he added.

"There were no reported casualties and our crews worked to bring this incident to a safe conclusion."