ENG-1987 — Page 278

PUBLIC ORDER

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Fire Services Communication Centre in Kowloon by instructors from the Training School. During the year, 510 recruits successfully completed initial training.

The school also conducted fire protection courses for senior station officers and station officers, refresher courses for ambulance personnel, basic courses on fire fighting, fighting fires on ships and on the use of breathing apparatus for government departments and private organisations in Hong Kong. Some 771 people attended these courses during the year. The Driving Training School conducted courses for 1 325 officers and other ranks.

Establishment and Recruitment

The uniformed establishment of the Fire Services Department at the end of 1987 totalled 6665. The number of civilian staff employed by the department increased to 661. Recruitment exercises were held, resulting in the appointment of 49 officers and 365 firemen and 63 ambulancemen. Standards are high and on average only about five per cent of all applicants are accepted for appointment.

Civil Aid Services

The role of the Civil Aid Services is to provide a uniformed and disciplined volunteer force of men and women trained in counter-disaster duties, in support of the regular emergency services and government departments. Members of the Civil Aid Services are trained to handle a very wide variety of emergency duties on such occasions as tropical cyclones, landslips and flooding, search and rescue, building collapses, forest fire fighting, refugee feeding and camp management, oil pollution at sea, crowd control, life saving, rabies control, and mountain rescue.

The service is also very heavily committed to assisting in performing civic duties during more peaceful times.

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During the year, adult volunteers helped to organise charity fund-raising walks, govern- ment campaigns, charity drives and other public functions.

The service was also kept busy helping fight forest fires and patrolling the country park areas, on tropical cyclones and mudslip standby duties and in helping in anti-oil pollution tasks.

The Mountain Rescue Unit of the service responded to 28 emergency calls for search and rescue of persons in distress, trapped, lost or injured.

Between July and September, CAS personnel were busily engaged in the management of two Refugee Reception Centres for the Ex-China Vietnamese Illegal Immigrants on Green Island and in the 25-storey Hoi Tai government-owned factory building in Tuen Mun. Due to the extreme urgency of the situation, the CAS were mobilised to help set up the centres in less than three days and to help process their arrival.

The service has two main training centres, and a 20-hectare training camp. The two training centres are on Hong Kong Island and in Kowloon. The training centres have simulated smoke-rooms, facilities for rescue from confined spaces, towers for practising rescue from heights and classrooms for indoor instruction.

The 20-hectare training camp at Tsing Lung Tau which incorporates an old Chinese village dating back 260 years was completely re-built several years ago and has now been furnished and equipped with farming equipment of the period. The camp is extensively used not only by the Civil Aid Services for training but also by many other government and non-government organisations. It has facilities for outdoor activities as well as two classrooms for indoor instructions. The outdoor facilities include a swimming pool, a jogging track, a rope initiative course, a soccer field, and camping areas.