‘Measures in place to give safe service during work’

FIRE control room staff are being decanted into temporary accommodation as work gets under way on a revamped facility in Dundee.

A £2 million upgrade is taking place at Macalpine Road Fire Station, which will largely focus on the call-handling facilities.

The city council recently granted planning permission for temporary buildings to be installed at the station to allow for the work to happen.

The structure will comprise of eight cabins, which will stay in place until May 2017.

It comes amid a shake-up of control room arrangements in Scotland that will see the integration of the Inverness, Aberdeen and Dundee control rooms — with the facility here handling calls for the north of Scotland.

Today, the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service insisted measures will be put in place to ensure responses in the city are not jeopardised during refurbishment work. A spokeswoman said: “Fail-safe measures have been put in place to ensure resilience during the refurbishment process.

“We respond to every emergency 999 call and this will not change.

“We want to ensure communities in the north are served by a state-of-theart control capability that will direct our local crews quickly and effectively to where they are needed.

“We are starting a carefully planned and phased programme led by a dedicated team.”

The initial stages of the refurbishment are getting under way and the work is expected to take several months to complete.

The spokeswoman added: “The process of merging and re routing our mobilising communication systems has been part of a carefully planned and detailed implementation programme by a dedicated team.

“It is anticipated that the refurbishment and full testing of the north control in Dundee will conclude by early 2017, with the migration of both the Inverness and Aberdeen controls expected to be complete by the first quarter of 2017.

“This will ensure the new operations control only comes online when we are fully satisfied that all testing, staff training and system integration has been successfully completed.

“We look forward to unveiling our new capability to communities in the North in early 2017.”