Our biggest priority is keeping the people of Cleveland safe from injury or harm as a result of fire and road traffic accidents or other major emergenices.
Learn and Live is one of our highest profile and hardest hitting campaigns and is aimed at achieving that priority.
It covers our two main areas of risk - road safety and home fire safety - where most people in our community are either killed on injured.
The campaign consist of two seperate, but related intiatives:
Learn & Live - road safety
Was developed by Station Manager Jimmy Ruse in response to the relatively high number of road traffic fatalities on the roads of Cleveland.
In the year before the campagin there were 33 road traffic fatalities in Cleveland, and before that we averaged 30-35 road traffic fatalities. In the first year Jimmy ran the campaign, we cut our road traffic fatalities to 18, and in the year following that they fell to 15.
The fall in road traffic fatalities soon attracted the interest of other brigades who have adopted the formula for their own communities.
Learn and Live Road Safety now sees partnership working with Cleveland Police, the North East Ambulance Service and local authority road traffic partnerships. It also features voluntary work from two pioneering members of the public, Jan Woodward and George Galli-Atkinson who both lost daugthers in road traffic accidents.
Learn & Live - home safety
Following the success in reducing road traffic fatalities and injuries, the Learn and Live formula was used to tackle home fire safety.
The same hard hitting presentation format is used to tackle accidental dwelling fire injuries and fatalities in the home.
Like Learn and Live Road Safety it uses graphic images, emotive vieo content and harrowing audio content from actual fire calls into the fire brigade control room to get the safety message across.
It is also supported by Lynne Ford who lost her son in a chip pan fire, and who has, like George Galli-Atkinson and Jan Woodward, campaigned tirelessly with the Brigade under the Learn and Live banner.
