Built in 2004, and opened in January 2005, Northmoor Community Fire Station is located on Northmoor Road in the centre of the Sunderland South area of the City of Sunderland. It covers several Local Council Wards namely; Barnes, Silksworth Close, St Anne’s, Doxford, St Chad’s, Sandhill, and Ryhope.

 

The station has two fire appliances and is staffed by 52 full time fire-fighters and 8 support staff. The staff are the main asset and, in addition to responding to emergencies, undertake a range of Community Safety (CS) activities that are primarily aimed at preventing fires and deaths and injuries in fires.

 

The station includes a Community Safety Centre which when fully resourced will include a Community Team, Centre Administrator, and a Young Fire-fighters Association (YFA). A further police presence in a local police station located behind the Community Safety Centre is almost a ‘one stop shop’ for all the community safety and security needs. Since opening the CS staff have a good working liaison with the Community Police Inspectors, and are engaged in several community forums within the station boundary.

The Community Safety Centre also boasts a 60 seater auditorium which has modern IT presentation capabilities, a meeting room and it is hoped to include in the near future a ‘Learn Direct’ computer suite, including access to the Internet, for further educational learning. This entire facility is integrated within a fully functional fire station.

 

 

The geographical area served by Northmoor Fire Station varies greatly from relatively affluent residential to large pre/post war council estates, and light and heavy industrial. It also includes one of Britain’s largest developing ‘call centre’ business parks at Doxford International Business Park.

 

The population, based on the 2001 Census, is 66,409 persons who are predominantly from Anglo-Saxon background (97.5%) with a relatively small ethnic group (1.4%). There are 28,655 dwellings within the Station area with approximately: -

 

 

Single parent families occupy 8.6% of dwelling, with 16.3% single pensioner households.

 

Levels of unemployment across this area vary from 12.3% for males and 6.7% for females. These figures reflect the wide variety of socio-economic groups residing within individual neighbourhoods, which can be linked to the risk of dwelling fires occurring within the area. This is illustrated in the above map of the station area (the red indicates areas where the risk of having a dwelling fire is well above average, orange is above average, yellow is average, blue is below average and green is well below average).

 

During 2005/09, the Doxford Park estate will be demolished to make way for 4000 new homes to be built by the Sunderland Housing Group. This will, when demolition is complete, reduce an area of high-risk housing and ‘hot spot’ for deliberate fires.

 

If you wish to know more about the specific fire service issues in your area and how we intend to address these, details have been included in our Station Plan.