Ahead of his appearance at The Emergency Services Show, Stockholm fire chief Peter Arnevall spoke to me about Sweden\u2019s approach to the risks they face. We talk about contaminants to find out how it has evolved since he was with us last year and how his service operates in a rapidly changing risk landscape shaped by geopolitics, climate change and evolving working practices. <\/p>\n
Greater Stockholm is the largest fire brigade in Scandinavia, with 900 full-time staff, including 600 firefighters, and around 250 volunteers serving 1.6 million people across a complex mix of dense urban areas, rural communities and an extraordinary archipelago. \u201cI think I have 27,000 islands within my area of responsibility,\u201d Peter explains, demonstrating quite how different his landscape is to what we know in the UK.<\/p>\n
Geopolitical risk<\/p>\n
While day-to-day work still centres on emergencies familiar to UK fire and rescue services, Peter is increasingly preoccupied by so\u2011called black swan events. He explains:<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat worries me the most at the moment is the black swan scenario. What I mean by that is terrorist attacks, the ongoing deadly violence going on across Europe and oil spills in the Baltic Sea, as the Russian shadow fleet is passing by our shores.\u201d<\/p>\n
With the EU\u2019s embargo on Russian oil, poorly maintained \u201cillegal pirate ships\u201d, as Peter describes them, have become a serious hazard in the Baltic. \u201cThose ships are in really bad condition, flying false flags with crews that don\u2019t know what they\u2019re doing.\u201d Although Sweden\u2019s Coast Guard leads at-sea response, responsibility shifts once pollution hits land. \u201cThe Coast Guard is in charge of the oil spill as long as it\u2019s on the sea. But as soon as it hits the shoreline, it\u2019s my responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n
For a region with 27,000 islands, the scale of a worst-case spill is sobering. \u201cImagine the amount of effort it would take to clean all the affected birds, fish, rocks, people, boats?\u201d he asks. Stockholm\u2019s fire service trains and exercises regularly for such scenarios and has invested in additional containers of specialist equipment and floating barriers. Yet, Peter is candid that some of the response would still be improvised: \u201cWe figure it out as we go\u2026 It\u2019s all depending on weather, what type of oil, is it happening within the archipelago or is it coming from the outside?\u201d<\/p>\n
Climate breakdown<\/p>\n
As the UK continues to battle with repeated heatwaves, I ask him about how Sweden is dealing wth climate change. \u201cWe see a huge impact. It hasn\u2019t rained here for three weeks now. The risk of wildfires are off the charts,\u201d he says. Southern Sweden is battling rising sea levels and depleted groundwater, while ecosystems shift northward. \u201cForests are shifting. The animals are moving north, which means that the typical Swedish animals like the moose are having a hard time surviving.\u201d<\/p>\n
Operationally, that means rethinking equipment and tactics. Stockholm is stockpiling more dual-use assets, particularly high-capacity pumps that can move water both for wildfire suppression and for urban flooding. The brigade is also adapting to use more non-potable water sources, accepting the challenges of saltwater corrosion. \u201cWe are making changes in our equipment, our methods and tactics, and trying to stay ahead of the curve,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n
Evolving working practices<\/p>\n
At the same time, internal working practices are evolving to reduce firefighters\u2019 long-term health risks, especially from contaminants. Sweden has spent the last 15 years embedding what Peter describes as the healthy worker model, redesigning stations, procedures and culture to minimise carcinogenic exposure. Renovation projects he presented a year ago are now complete. \u201cWe\u2019ve done everything to make sure it\u2019s up to date and modern and up to standards. We keep on going in the same path we\u2019re doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Peter spoke about this work when he joined us on stage at The Emergency Services Show<\/a> last year. I asked him how much had changed in the last 12 months and he says it is firmly embedded. He explains: \u201cThe mindset within the workforce is set, so it\u2019s within our culture now. The firefighters decontaminate on scene as a matter of course; they are really taking care of themselves.\u201d <\/p>\n The results are striking as he shares the work of academics looking at their activity. \u201cWe had a scientist doing a study on all the available data, and he could actually see that the Swedish firefighters, as of now, have the same risk or probability of getting cancer as the standard population.\u201d Given that firefighters tend to be fitter and healthier than average, Peter believes the risk should ideally be even lower, but he is clear: \u201cWe\u2019re doing something right.\u201d<\/p>\n All this is happening while fire incidents are declining; Greater Stockholm now responds to around 11,000 call-outs a year, down from 12,000 seven years ago, even as the population grows. \u201cThe Swedish society is getting safer and safer and safer,\u201d Peter notes. \u201cThe problem is that the probability for these really big events is going the other way\u2026 Whether or not we\u2019re talking about the risk of war, climate change, flooding, rain, storms, snow, terrorist attacks, ongoing deadly violence, school shootings, the risk of those types of incidents are going up, but we can\u2019t see it in the statistics.\u201d<\/p>\n That shift demands more training and more system-level resilience, not just a stronger fire service. \u201cA resilient society depends on more than just a resilient fire and rescue service,\u201d he concludes. And that, it seems, will require resource and political will to make any long term changes stick. <\/p>\n Four days after speaking to me, Peter\u2019s role changes as he moves away from the fire department to become Sweden\u2019s Director of Rescue Services and Civil Protection at the Swedish Civil Defence Agency. It\u2019s a big job but he\u2019s certainly the one to do it, despite his protestations to me that he\u2019s just a boy from the north of Sweden. <\/p>\n You can hear Peter speak twice at the show on 16 September. He will be in stage with London Fire Brigade\u2019s\u2019 ACC Pat Goulbourne to wrap up the Protecting the Protectors programme. Earlier in the day he will be part of our new Resilience360 offering as we explore the wider world of resilience beyond the emergency services. Register for your free ticket\u00a0here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ahead of his appearance at The Emergency Services Show, Stockholm fire chief Peter Arnevall spoke to me about…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":145640,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[83],"tags":[913,69405,7584,131,69406,132,69407],"class_list":["post-145639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-stockholm","tag-climate-change","tag-contaminants","tag-geopolitics","tag-stockholm","tag-stockholm-fire-brigade","tag-sweden","tag-the-emergency-services-show"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/117092423164507145","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145639\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}