North Wales Fire and Rescue Service

North Wales Fire and Rescue Service

Gwasanaeth Tân ac Achub Gogledd Cymru (Welsh)
Operational area
Country	Wales
Region	North Wales
Principal areas	6 Anglesey Conwy Denbighshire Flintshire Gwynedd Wrexham
Agency overview
Established	1996 (1996)
Chief Fire Officer	Dawn Docx
Facilities and equipment
Stations	44
Website
www.nwales-fireservice.org.uk

The North Wales Fire and Rescue Service (NWFRS; Welsh: Gwasanaeth Tân ac Achub Gogledd Cymru) is the fire and rescue service covering the principal areas of Anglesey, Conwy, Denbighshire, Flintshire, Gwynedd and Wrexham in the north of Wales. With service coverage in north-west Wales being predominantly rural. The NWFRS is headquartered in St Asaph, Denbighshire, Wales.

The service was created in 1996 by the Local Government (Wales) Act 1994 which reformed Welsh local government, by a merger of the previous Clwyd and Gwynedd fire services. It covers an area of 2,400 square miles (6,200 km²) with around 670,000 people. The Service employs over 1000 staff in operational and support roles.^[1]

The fire authority which administers the service is a joint board made up of councillors from Anglesey, Conwy, Denbighshire, Flintshire, Gwynedd and Wrexham councils.

Appliances and Crewing

North Wales Fire and Rescue Service operates 44 Fire Stations. Bangor, Caernarfon, Colwyn Bay, Deeside, Holyhead, Llandudno, Rhyl and Wrexham are all crewed by wholetime firefighters. All stations also have a retained crew.^[2]. Within these stations are a total of 54 firefighting appliances, 1 Incident Command Unit at Rhyl, 3 Aerial Ladder Platforms at Bangor, Rhyl and Wrexham in addition to 28 other specialised response vehicles such as foam carriers and high volume pumps.^[3]

As of 2025, Porthmadog and Dolgellau are also wholetime crewed as part of a "nucleus trial", where the wholetime firefighters form a crew with the retained firefighters in that area.^[4]

The fire and rescue service operates three duty crewing systems: they are wholetime, day-crewed and an “on-call” retained duty system. Wholetime fire appliances are crewed twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Day-crewed appliances are crewed by wholetime firefighters based at the fire station between 8 am and 6 pm. The same firefighters then provide cover from home outside of these hours as retained firefighters. Retained firefighters are summoned to the fire station by pager from home or work to respond to emergency calls. Cross-crewing is a cost-cutting measure that sees various fire appliances being crewed by a single crew. This means, for example, if an appliance in the cross-crewing system responds to an incident, any other appliances in the system will be unavailable as they will have no crew.

List of Fire Stations

^[5]

See also

• List of British firefighters killed in the line of duty
• North Wales Police

References

External links

• Official website