This article is from page 44 of the 2014-01-21 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 44 JPG
THE St Stephen’s night storm was responsible for 61 per cent of all of the Christmas callouts for Clare’s Fire and Rescue Service.
As many as 70 of the 115 incidents attended by the emergency services between December 20, 2013, and January 3, 2014, involved falling trees on the night of December 26, at a cost of approximately € 60,000 to the Fire Service.
Meanwhile, non-weather related callouts – 45, were down across the county for a fourth successive year.
The call-out figures for the period were less than those recorded during the corresponding periods in 2010, 2011 and 2012 when the Fire Service was mobilised to 81, 64 and 48 incidents respectively.
This Christmas, six of the callouts related to house fires with a further six call-outs involving chimney fires, while fire-fighters also attended 14 road-based incidents, foor agricultural building fires, three storage building fires and five false alarm.
The busiest station this Christmas was Ennis, attending to 61 of the calls, followed by Shannon who attended 23.
“This was one of the busiest periods experienced by Clare County Fire and Rescue Service since the serious flooding which affected Clare in November 2009,” explained Adrian Kelly, Chief Fire Officer.
“The extremely windy conditions late on St Stephen’s Day and in the early hours of December 27 brought down a lot of trees throughout the county leading to some roads being blocked. Furthermore, other roads were impassable for a time due to flooding brought about by heavy rain. Due to the assistance of members of the public, together with staff from Clare Local Authorities, we were able to deal quickly with these incidents so as to ensure any disruption was minimised,” he said.