‘I absolutely loving being here,’ said Les Britzman, who took up the role only two months ago.
‘I have a brilliant team on a beautiful island.
‘I can’t get over where I live.
‘In the morning I go out with my cup of tea, watch the sea and I can’t believe it’s my workplace as well my home.’
Mr Britzman has taken over the role from Jon Le Page, who stepped down after 13 years in the role.
He had previously been Lincolnshire’s chief fire officer, but had stepped down in 2022 at the standard retirement age of 55.
‘I did a lot of motor biking and went around Europe, but I still felt I had something to give and it felt a little bit too early to be fully retiring,’ he said.
‘Then the job came up in Guernsey. A friend of mine was over in Jersey, and he just gave me the idea of how I could carry on.’
He has spent the last two months getting to grips with the challenges of running a fire service where it is not possible to call for help from your neighbours.
‘We’ve got pretty much every operational risk you can think of, apart from high rise buildings – we’ve got tall buildings, not high rise – so the diversity of the risks on this island are as broad, if not broader, than any other fire service in the UK. And we haven’t got the benefit of colleagues from over the county border to come in if we get a big emergency. If you want 20 fire engines in the UK, you’ll get them eventually,’ he said.
‘Obviously we can’t do that, so we have to plan our response and think about the safety of our crew much earlier on.’
Mr Britzman began his career as a professional engineer before starting as a recruit firefighter in Nottinghamshire in 1995. He went on to work in Norfolk where he was promoted as head of fire protection and fire service operations for the east of the county.
‘I was on a very busy inner city station when I was in Nottinghamshire – the most calls I had in one night was 17, but that was as a fairly junior commander and they were relatively small emergencies.
‘My biggest actual fire was in Norfolk, and we had two square miles of standing wheat ablaze, and that was huge. You couldn’t even see either end of the fires.’
Also while in Norfolk, he led preparations for a predicted tidal surge.
‘The last time that happened was 1953, when hundreds of people died,’ he said.
‘So we were basically doing a lot of planning and preparation, and that involved a nationwide response, with teams coming in to support us, and included working with the highest levels of government.’
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