ExeterFire safety experts from Essex will soon be providing specialist advice and services to Cambridgeshire Fire & Rescue Service (CCFRS) after signing up to a partnership.

The deal was made between EFA Trading Ltd, the commercial arm of Essex County Fire & Rescue Service (ECFRS), and CCFRS, and will see ECFRS Technical Fire Safety Engineers providing a paid for consultancy service for fire engineering design

When a building is large or complex it often does not meet building regulations guidance. This is when the Technical Fire Safety team will become involved; revisiting the designs and calculating how long it will take for a building to become unsafe in a fire and how long it will take for the occupants to escape.

ECFRS’s Technical Fire Safety Officers will assist the neighbouring county’s service with the specialist knowledge and experience needed to carry out this work. This will include assessing fire evacuation strategies, creating models to predict how fires react, producing reports and recommendations for building regulations and supporting future auditing and inspections.

Julian Ashley, Head of Safer Communities at ECFRS, said: “Our fire engineering team are extremely experienced in dealing with workplace fire issues. They are able to support the early stages of design of any type of work space to ensure the fire safety of the public and firefighters are taken into account.

“This new partnership means that we are sharing our skill set within Essex, using our expertise and knowledge with other fire and rescue services to help them keep their communities safer and generating income.”

This is the second contract of this type that ECFRS have entered in to. The first agreement was with Suffolk Fire and Rescue Service in September 2016.