Buckinghamshire Fire & Rescue Service choose the L200 for Search and Rescue [UK]

Monday, 08 December 2008

MITSUBISHI SEALS URBAN FIRE AND RESCUE ROLE
~ Buckinghamshire Fire & Rescue Service Choose The L200 For Their Specialist Requirements ~

Buckinghamshire Fire and Rescue Service (BFRS) serves a population of over 707,000 people with an area stretching from the outskirts of London into the Midlands. Every year it receives over 21,000 calls for assistance, over 10,000 of which are for emergency incidents – that’s more than 27 emergency call-outs per day, every day.

L200s Called Into Service Within Hours
With the recent introduction of five Mitsubishi L200s to their fleet, the Buckinghamshire Fire & Rescue Service (BFRS) has expanded its fleet to 170 vehicles – 115 cars and vans and 115 front-line vehicles including fire engines, Urban Search and Rescue lorries and special appliances such as turntable ladders and water carriers.

Jez Finden (Group Manager, Transport) commented that within hours of the two vehicles being registered with them they were out in action, helping with a number of incidents which occurred during a period of unusually heavy rain and flooding.

The L200 - A True Working Vehicle
Roy Harold (Area Manager, Property, Procurement & Transport) found that many vehicles in the same class as the L200 were aimed more at the leisure market than the demanding work environment: “we needed a vehicle that had AWD capability with a good ground clearance for use in adverse weather conditions such as snow and floods. Our Urban Search and Rescue teams have to cope with some of the most extreme and dangerous situations, so we needed vehicles that could go off-tarmac in a wide variety of emergency scenarios.”