Firefighters at the scene of a recycling plant fire last week. Photo: RNZ / Calvin Samuel
Fire and Emergency began moving to urgently restart a group working on a strategy for replacing its big-ladder trucks, just before one broke down in Auckland last week, stranding firefighters above scorching flames.
The agency told RNZ on Monday it is investing as much as it can afford in new trucks, as well as developing a "fleet asset management plan", and that safety is its top priority.
But that management plan, like the truck strategy about what to buy when, and where to put it, is years overdue.
The union has questioned how long the management plan will take, while blaming Thursday's truck breakdown at the Glenfield factory fire - like other earlier breakdowns - in part on lack of a strategy to upgrade the whole fire truck fleet.
The pair of firefighters stuck in a ladder basket of the truck had to issue a 'mayday' call to get another truck to help them escape.
Five years ago, an inquiry into the Auckland Convention Centre fire told FENZ it did not have enough big-ladder trucks - so-called aerials - and a national strategy for them was "overdue".
FENZ then took three years, until 2023, to come up with a draft.
It took another year, until last November, to review the draft.
A few weeks ago it told the union, "The aerial appliance strategy has not yet been finalised or approved."
Also it said, "The aerial strategy working group has been requested to be reconvened with urgency by acting DCE SD (deputy chief executive service delivery) Operations, Ken Cooper to finalise and present this work back to the organisation for approval."
On Monday afternoon this week, FENZ told RNZ, "We have a draft aerial strategy which is being refined to ensure that it is appropriately future looking, affordable and achievable."
As for the new fleet asset management plan, the work on this comes a year after FENZ said it was assessing its fleet for gaps exposed by Cyclone Gabrielle. Months prior to that, RNZ had reported on the agency's years of struggle to keep its fleet up to scratch.
At the Glenfield fire on Thursday, "everything that could go wrong did go wrong", said the Professional Firefighters' Union (NZPFU).
The Green Party claimed vital maintenance was being deferred.
FENZ responded, "The state of some of our fleet is in part a legacy of deferred maintenance and purchasing of new vehicles by our predecessor organisations."
Its predecessor, the Fire Service, was disestablished in 2017, but had bought some smaller fire engines that have since exhibited a lot of problems.
Both the union and Greens called on Monday for the government to intervene.
RNZ on Monday asked Internal Affairs Minister Brooke van Velden if she would.
Instead, she reissued a statement made on Sunday:
"I know the recent fire on Auckland's North Shore will have shocked the local community and I thank all the FENZ personnel who fought to bring the fire under control.
"FENZ has an active investigation open on their operations that evening and I will not be commenting further at this stage. I will expect to see the results of their investigation," van Velden said.
Internal Affairs Minister Brooke van Velden. Photo: RNZ / Reece Baker
Since the fatal Loafers Lodge fire in May 2023, the agency set out to buy five new big-ladder trucks; it had already bought over a hundred smaller ones prior to that, in its fleet of over a thousand vehicles.
It did this without having first done the aerial strategy the 2020 inquiry recommended, an exercise that might seek to account for population growth and type, building types and the optimum spread of professional and volunteer firefighting resources. It might, for instance, consider how the likes of rapidly growing central Otago relies on a 17m-ladder-truck coming from Invercargill or a 32m-ladder one from Dunedin, and whether to reconfigure which area has how much of what, to address this.
The five big trucks might be ready for service later this year - four 17m trucks and a 32m one, for Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, Dunedin and Christchurch - to replace old trucks rather than expand the fleet.
"We are confident [these] will be fully compatible with the final aerial strategy," deputy chief executive of organisational strategy and capability development, Sarah Sinclair, said in a statement on Monday.
The organisation's fleet replacement programme envisages renewing some of its small and rural trucks - such as utes - before replacing crucial mid-size pumping trucks (called Type 4s, versus Type 5 and 6 big-ladder trucks).
At the fatal Loafers Lodge fire in Wellington two years ago, the sole big-ladder truck available saved people off the roof. A second was sitting broken down - as was fairly routine - at Newtown fire station.
The Newtown truck looks set to be replaced by one of the five new ones.
Firetrucks attend the fatal Loafers Lodge fire in Wellington in 2023. Photo: RNZ / Denise Garland
However, the failed Glenfield one looks like it will go back into service following a FENZ investigation into what went wrong last week, as a ladder-truck at Parnell station is even older.
"We are investing as much as we can in new trucks with the funding we have available to us," Sinclair told RNZ.
"We maintain our existing fleet proactively and reactively, to optimise its performance - safety is our highest priority."
Previously FENZ has said ladder-trucks were not often used to evacuate people, though at Loafers the ladder was vital. Also, they are crucial for multi-storey fire fighting.
Since the 2020 convention centre inquiry, several other big ladder-trucks have also failed several times in the main centres.
The agency in its 10-year plan in 2020 said, "We are committed to being strategy-led."
It has strategies for digital, Māori, research and evaluation strategy as well as a 'Future Strategy Connection Map', but no strategy for big fire trucks.
Its 10-year plan said, "We will introduce new appliances as needed ... [and] replace fleet to ensure it remains reliable, safe and operational-ready."
It envisaged the big trucks being replaced by mid-2024, and smaller workhorse trucks by mid-2029.
A later report pushed the big-truck replacement back to 2023-27.
The government knocked back some of the funding rise FENZ sought last year. Most of its $700m or so funding comes from levies on insurance premiums.
Timeline
- 2019 - Too few big ladder-trucks at Auckland International Convention Centre fire
- 2020 - Inquiry says a 20-year aerial strategy 'is overdue"
- 2023 - First draft of strategy done
- May 2023 - Loafers Lodge fire kills five; one of Wellington's two big-ladder trucks broken down at the time
- 2023-24 - FENZ orders five new aerials
- November 2024 - First draft of aerial strategy updated
- March 2025 - Aerial strategy group requested to reconvene "with urgency"
- April 2025 - Breakdown leaves firefighters hanging over Glenfield fire
- Late 2025-26 - Five new aerials arriving as replacements
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