News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on THW: Germany′s army of volunteers for disaster relief. Parent comment

Re:THW: Germany′s army of volunteers for disaster relief by twic on Wednesday July 21, 2021 @06:10AM (#27904329)
It would be interesting to have a table comparing how this works across countries.

In the UK:

- Police are mostly professional, but there are voluntary special constables [1]; ~130k professionals, ~10k specials [2]

- Firefighters are kind of all professional; most are full-time, but some are "on call", having other jobs, but running off to put out fires when needed (and being paid for it) [3]. On-call firemen are often the only cover in rural areas. About 20k full-time, 10k on-call [4].

- Ambulance staff are almost all professional. There are volunteers, but a small number [5]. However there is also the St John Ambulance, a medical charity that does some ambulance-esque things, including providing first aid at public events [6]. Air ambulances are completely separate and operated by local charities [7] [8], so not available everywhere in the country.

- Mountain rescue, cave rescue, and sea rescue are all entirely charitable volunteer organisations. Search and rescue helicopters used to be provided by the RAF, but are now a private service contracted to the coastguard.

- We don't have any equivalent of the THW, as far as i know. The fire service do some kind of disaster relief, particularly if it involves pumping water. But for the rest of it, there just isn't any systematic response.

[1] https://www.met.police.uk/car/careers/met/police-volunteer-r...

[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

[3] https://oncallfire.uk/wp-content/uploads/On-call-firefighter...

[4] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/fire-and-rescue-wor...

[5] https://www.londonambulance.nhs.uk/working-for-us/volunteeri...

[6] https://www.sja.org.uk/what-we-do/

[7] https://theairambulanceservice.org.uk/

[8] https://www.londonsairambulance.org.uk/

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:THW: Germany′s army of volunteers for disaster relief by jon-wood on Wednesday July 21, 2021 @06:47AM (#27904558)
> We don't have any equivalent of the THW, as far as i know. The fire service do some kind of disaster relief, particularly if it involves pumping water. But for the rest of it, there just isn't any systematic response.

Typically if large scale disaster response is needed the army will be called in, when there was flooding in the town I lived a while back they turned up to fill and distribute sandbags, and worked with the fire brigade to get temporary flood defences put up.

[ Parent | on HN ]