A PETITION calling on the fire service to restore a district’s last remaining full time fire station has been signed by more than a thousand people in a week.

Essex County Fire and Rescue Service announced it plans to cut services at South Woodham Ferrers from a 24/7 service to on-call only last year.

The station is mid way through moving to a part-time basis but there is a shortage of retained firefighters and the number of wholetime firefighters in the county have fallen below the critical minimum.

A petition has been started by Kyle Jannece who wants to reverse the “potentially disastrous” decision after obtaining response times from a Freedom of Information request.

He said: “We wish for current levels of cover to be protected and upheld, we do not want the increase to response times and risk of life that will come with the downgrade.

“This is not an attack on the great job that on-call firefighters facilitate.

“The Burnham-on-Crouch Fire Station facilitates an ‘on-call’ service and in 2017 have been unavailable 39 per cent of the time.

“Similarly, Tillingham’s ‘on-call’ service is unavailable 17 per cent of the time.

“This is all due to a lack of available on-call firefighters during times of incident or emergency, and when these stations are without adequate cover, it is the South Woodham day crew who travel out to ensure the stations are manned.”

Less than two thirds of incidents are being responded to within 15 minutes across the Maldon district following cuts and the figure is falling.

A spokesman for the fire service said: “We are recruiting on call firefighters at South Woodham Ferrers and so far have had a very positive response. We are confident we will recruit the required number of firefighters to cover the fire engine day and night.

“The current day crewed firefighters will remain in place until the required number of firefighters have been recruited and trained.

“If availability drops in an area the service will move resources to ensure fire cover is maintained across the whole county.

“Throughout our public consultation we have acknowledged changing from day crewed to on call will have an impact on response times during the day.

“However, the service is committed to attend an emergency incident as quickly as possible.

More than 70 per cent of fire stations in Essex provide fire cover using on call firefighters, many of which attend more incidents than South Woodham Ferrers.”

View the petition at https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/save-the-south-woodham-ferrers-fire-service-1.