Euston Pump Modernised 12 September 2006
(Editors note) This site receives dozens of emails and articles each week from the station and around the world. The vast majority of those emails are positive in nature. It would be damaging to the Brigade and to those that work at Euston to post up details of near misses, losses of communication, attendance times, or other serious breaches in safty that happen on a regular basis. Those statistics are kept seperatly from this website. However, the heartfelt letter below from CM Debenidictis was posted as it reflected the views of the majority at Euston. It has, in three years of this sites existence, been the only such letter of its nature. If the people of London are able to see the work we do, our commitment to training, our hunger for new ideas and ways of working and our combined years of experience, then that can only go to reassure them in times of crises. We want those poeple who live and work in London to know that we are there 24 hours a day 7 days a week. That we care about what we do, and we care about them.
12th September 2006. The removal of Euston's Pump, which has served the proud people of Camden since 1902. For those not in the know the great and good of the LFEPA deemed that A232 would be better deployed in the suburbs. Some statistician has worked out that the sleeping residential life risk on Euston's ground is adequately served by having only one front line fire engine protecting it, even though Euston's ground has been expanded by the closure of A22 Manchester Square and the subsequent dividing up of its spoils.
Can anyone see the sense in this money driven policy thinly disguised by those holding the purse strings as providing a better service to the people of are great Metropolis. Hogwash!!! We all know that in the future these so called protectors of the London Fire Brigade will approach the statisticians again and say that savings have to be made how can we make it look like pumps are not needed. Hey presto the figure for fire deaths and the way fire deaths figures are interpreted are manipulated and Walla the pump can be decommissioned and taken away from the Suburbs once again as in the late 1970's. ( The deaths of those Londoners on 7/7 at Russell Square and Tavistock Square have not been put down as fire deaths even though technically a spark was needed to light a combustible material.)
The introduction of the Channel Rail link into St Pancras will see the whole scale redevelopment of the Kings Cross area. There are proposals in place to build 8000 new homes in the former Goods Yard triangle behind Kings Cross Station which I think may just slightly increase the sleeping residential life risk by some 15000 people, give or take a few thousand.
I have been privileged to have been stationed at Euston
since 1985 and served with individuals who have earned my respect through
their
professionalism, talent, bravery and humour the likes of which I feel have
earned the right to call themselves EUSTON FIREMEN.
Well let us raise a glass and toast this SAD DAY and hope that this decision does not result in the death or injury to either the people of Camden or their Firefighters.
Ben De Benedictis
White Watch
A23 Euston