The province of Antalya has a population of 2.2 million people with a growth rate of 4.2%. During summer period, this number increases to 4 million. The jurisdiction of Antalya Metropolitan Municipality has expanded to 19 districts and 21,109 km² and has reached the borders of Antalya province after 2014. 57% of the province is covered by forests. Due to high temperature in summer, forest and grass fires increase in rural areas. According to records, the number of fire cases was 9,345 and 51 % of the fires occurred in rural areas in 2015 . The number of search and rescue cases was 7,270 and 3,590 of them occured in rural areas. After growing of the province borders, fire brigade has begun to intervene in the fire and rescue cases in rural areas by sending support teams from city center since the number and capacity of firefighters in those areas is not adequate. Waiting for intervention from city center has caused loss of time and lives. Before 2014, the municipality had 11 fire stations in the city center and the number became 36 after the district municipalities handed over their stations to metropolitan municipality. Most of the fire stations in the districts have got outdated equipments and vehicles and the firefighters have not been well-trained. Also, the number of fire stations is not enough for providing fire service to the highlands or forestlands in rural areas. The firefighter staff has been trained, the fire stations have been renewed, but stil the number of firefighter staff is not enough for safety. The commonly-held ratio for firefighter number to population is 1:1000 but the budget has not allowed the municipality to hire 1500 firefighters as professional. Voluntary firefighting can be the solution of this problem. In Turkey, there has not been a unique system about voluntary firefighting. The Municipality prepared the Regulation of Voluntary Firefighting last year in order to train people from the local people so that when an incident occurs, by the time professional firefighters coming and intervening the incidents, the volunteer firefighters can work as first responders and this action can reduce the loss of life and property. With this project, it is aimed to minimize the problems to be confronted during firefighting and rescue services by transfer of good practices from voluntary firefighting systems of EU countries. By establishing volunteer fire stations in rural areas of Antalya districts where transportation is difficult and fire station is inadequate in terms of equipment and capacity, it will be possible to respond to fires and rescue cases with volunteers. The volunteer firefighters serving in rural fire stations will be able to intervene in the incidents in the shortest time without waiting support teams from the city center. In the long run, the volunteers who learn effective intervention techniques through trainings received by partners, will be able to more quickly respond to incidents by winning the necessary practice. Volunteer firefighters from the region will increase the awareness of the local people against the fire and this will allow them to behave conscious about fire prevention. Along with the security of life and property, safety of the forests and historical sites in the region will increase.For this reason, proposed project involves in visiting the EU countries which have different voluntary firefighting systems, observing and benchmarking their processes, adapting and implementing the most suitable system in Antalya, training of Antalya firefighter staff related with methodology and technology about voluntary firefighting and establishing a pilot station. New volunteer fire stations will be established by the municipality in the villages and local people will be trained due to the training programme developed with this project. With VOLFIRE project these are aimed to realize:• Long lasting effects on the participating organizations, sustainable co-operation and experience sharing,• Enhancing the quality and providing the continuity of the services rendered by Antalya Fire Brigade,• After training the trainers from Antalya Fire Brigade, spread of the training to the volunteer firefighters working in the rural areas of Antalya city.• Sharing of the outputs of the project and the knowledge.The project addresses these issues by developing a toolbox of integrated components for firefighters. By increasing the knowledge and skills level of target group including new voluntary firefighting system will help reach at the EU standards.This project will be a guide for other fire brigades in Turkey and partner countries. Involved participants from different countries across Europe and the results of the common work will have impact not only on local level but also regional, national and international.Total project budget is 285.851 Euro. Project will be carried out partnership with Slovenia, Czech Republic, Ireland and as local partner CEUPA and AID.
The VOLFIRE project was carried out with the objective of giving occupational training to a group of professional firefighters in Antalya to start volunteer firefighting and establish volunteer fire brigade stations in the settlements where professional firefighter employment is not possible, and the population and the possibility of fire and rescue incidents is low, thus reducing the loss of life and property in case of fires, disasters and emergencies in these rural areas will be possible. The project was also aimed to develop a model for other regions to start volunteer firefighting with certain standards. The project was carried out in the coordination of Antalya Metropolitan Municipality Fire Brigade Department and Governorship of Antalya from Turkey, Fire and Rescue Service of Ljubljana (GBL) from Slovenia, Mayo County Council (MCC) from Ireland and The Czech Association of the Fire Officers (CAFO) from Czech Republic worked on this project as partners. Within the scope of VOLFIRE, the voluntary firefighting systems of 3 European countries was examined and adaptation to Turkey has been planned. The objective of this project is to improve the vocational capacity of the trainers based on European Union standards. Vocational training will increase the competences of trainers and exchanging experiences and knowledge will be the main priority of this project. The main priority of the project is to ensure safe, fast, coordinated in joint disaster/accident response whenever needed. That includes both, professional and volunteer rescue services response and possible implementation of volunteer services establishment where needed. In some areas of European Union fire services are well organized, as volunteer and professional services are working hand in hand for decades, mainly based on tradition in cultural inheritage. This makes providing for efficient and integrated guidelines services and flexible learning. A special guideline has been prepared for volunteer firefighters and firefighter candidates in the project. This guideline contains important firefighting and rescue techniques and images for a volunteer firefighter in such cases fire, traffic accident, search and rescue, first aid etc. Tools have been created of ICT based e-learning program and online communication. The e-learning module was added to the project's website in 4 different languages which developed by the Slovenian project partner with the support of all project partners in order to keep the knowledge alive for targeted groups and to ensure the continuity of their education. It includes training documents, educational and tutorial short videos and exams to test people's knowledge. For the training of volunteer firefighting; A total of 38 hours of training curriculum containing 12 topics were developed under the responsibility of the project coordinator with contributions from all project partners. In order to carry on the activities effectively and on time, a Project Guideline for Effective Collaboration (PGEC) was developed and delivered to each partner organization when Partnership Agreement was signed with them. Program rules, work packages, responsibilities were explained in PGEC and served as a guide for each partner through the project term. 16 short videos have been prepared by GBL in accordance with the voluntary firefighting education curriculum to be used in trainings. These videos were uploaded via e-learning module together with other training documents and also will be use for the subsequent training of volunteer firefighters. Analysis has been carried out to initiate voluntary firefighting practices in Antalya where firefighter employment is not possible and the population is low and accordingly, probability of fire incidents occur less likely. The purpose of this analysis is to determine the adequacy of present fire stations and its personnel in Antalya city province and to determine the number of fire stations and volunteer firefighters needed by each. This analysis has been prepared via the executive function of MCC with the contribution of all project partners. MCC has been prepared an evaluation report containing following topics; the nature of project management, clarity in defining project objectives, planning the activities of the project, managing the progress of the activities; management of the cooperative work of the partners, adaptation to time and milestones, and TPM administration and so on. These evaluation reports have been distributed to all partners. Owing to these reports, the opportunity to evaluate the strength of the success of the project has emerged. These collaborations will ensure gains to be obtain advancing the ties of friendship between both groups in European countries and Turkey, developing capacity to do business, transferring of knowledge and skills, enhancing present environment of trust and so on.