Our mission is 'Making South Yorkshire safer and stronger' and our work to achieve this extends to far more than fighting fires. Our firefighters respond to a wide range of emergencies including road traffic collisions, water rescues and many other types of ‘special service’ incidents. However, whilst our work responding to 999 calls is both well known and well valued by the public, far more of our contact with local people is actually through our varied and extensive work to prevent incidents from happening in the first place. To deliver this work, we employ more than 600 people, most of whom are firefighters. The majority of these are wholetime firefighters, which means they are available to attend emergency incidents 24 hours a day. We also employ on-call firefighters at some of our fire stations. Our firefighters are supported by teams of support staff who are skilled to provide a wide range of specialist services. This includes our community safety work and our responsibilities to enforce business fire safety laws. We also work with a network of volunteers to further extend the reach of our prevention work.