Is Saving Cats a Good Use of a Fire Crew’s Time?

A very interesting article published on the IFSEC Fire website last week looked at the issue of fire crew’s saving cats.

It was prompted from a story of a fire crew in Carlisle who rescued a kitten from the engine of a car – its new owners then christened it “Miracle.”  It apparently took two and a half hours to save the cat which was completely stuck.

The question being asked is how much does it cost to send a fire engine out?

An exact figure of how much a 2.5-hour call out would cost the Cumbrian council tax payer is hard to work out, but the IFSEC Fire made some informed guesses and worked out that London Fire Brigade estimates that the 40,734 false call-outs they received in 2012 cost £37 million, so on that basis the average call-out costs them about £908 — a decent approximate figure we can use for Cumbria, given no similar figures are readily available.

Cumbria Fire and Rescue Service states in its 2012/13 service plan that the minimum crew size per appliance is four. Again, pay figures from Cumbria are hard to find, but Staffordshire FRS puts its basic hourly rate for a competent firefighter is £13.

So the time the staff spent attending the incident, plus the 6 minutes average time to respond to an incident and the 9-minute drive back would have cost the fire service another £143.

This adds up to a highly approximate £1,051 to save a cat from a car bonnet.

The question is put for you to decide if this is money well spent?  To read more see ww.ifsecglobal.com.