The firefighting union has slammed the Emergency Services Agency after a house sustained significant damage in a fire while the pumper crew from the closest ACT Fire and Rescue station was knocking on doors in another part of the ACT.
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But ACT Fire and Rescue chief officer Mark Brown dismissed the criticism, saying resources were regularly moved around to fill coverage gaps and that the crew in question was always available, but wasn't called to the blaze because other crews were better placed to respond.
A Rawson Homes display home in Denman Prospect was damaged in an October 13 fire caused by a component in a solar panel. Rawson Homes general manager Craig Moore said the home would be demolished and rebuilt.
Four ACT Fire and Rescue pumpers responded to the fire and arrived at the scene in Kondelea Way at 11.03am, 14 minutes after the initial call.
The first two pumpers to arrive had been standing by at Phillip Fire Station - 11.8 kilometres away - when the call was received, while one came from a training exercise in Hume and the other was mobile.
When the call came in, the pumper crew from Belconnen - the closest ACT Fire and Rescue station at a distance of 9.3 kilometres from the scene of the fire - was knocking on doors in Hackett and Watson as part of a community engagement exercise to prepare residents for bushfires.
United Firefighters Union ACT branch secretary Greg McConville said the incident showed the Emergency Services Agency had its priorities wrong.
"The ESA has a distorted sense of priority if they think firefighters are wasted in ComCen, but they're out doorknocking while a house burns down," Mr McConville said.
ComCen, the Emergency Services Agency's communications centre, is manned by trained firefighters, but the agency is working on plans to return firefighters to the frontline and have civilians taking triple-zero calls.
Mr McConville said the pumper crew from Charnwood Fire Station was in Hume at the time of the Denman Prospect fire, leaving Belconnen with "no fire cover".
But Mr Brown said ACT Fire and Rescue said resources were regularly moved around the territory to fill coverage gaps and that decisions were made with the whole ACT built-up area in mind, rather than just specific parts of the territory.
"I don’t lose any sleep over that because I know over the whole of the territory, we’re managing our resources to achieve the best response times we can, given the resources we’ve got at any one time," Mr Brown said.
The most recent performance figures, from 2016-17, show ACT firefighters had the fastest response times in Australia, responding to 90 per cent of structure fires within nine minutes and six seconds.
Mr Brown said those figures, which looked at the ACT as a whole, were more significant than those contained in a 2015 report that broke down response times for each Canberra district.
That report, prepared by UK company Operational Health, found firefighters were slower to respond to incidents in the Molonglo Valley, which includes Denman Prospect, than anywhere else in Canberra.
The report found that in 40.4 per cent of cases in 2014, ACT Fire and Rescue pumpers arrived at the scene of fires within six-and-a-half minutes. That figure dropped to 5.9 per cent when applied only to the Molonglo Valley.
"It’s not a concern because we are planning to build a fire station in the Molonglo Valley, and the [union] are aware of those plans," Mr Brown said.
"The level of development in that area is really not at the level right now where we actually have a fire station, but we’re doing the pre-planning for it now.
"We’re investigating sites for a new [ACT Fire and Rescue] fire station and there will be a fire station there in the next year or two."
