AFTER 30 'incredible' years at Oxfordshire Fire and Rescue Service, fire chief Dave Etheridge OBE will this week retire.

In that time, he says the authority has changed dramatically. So much so that he now has the 'nice problem' of struggling to keep up with everything his organisation does.

For firefighters don't just fight fires anymore – they are out in the community helping with all kinds of public safety issues, as he told reporter Matt Oliver.

"The whole culture is different now. It's all about protection and prevention.

"We do a lot of work with the elderly and infirm, doorstep crime, road safety with young people, healthy eating in schools, smoking cessation and fitness campaigns."

The main catalyst for change, says 50-year-old fire chief Dave Etheridge, has been his service's groundbreaking '365alive' safety campaign.

Since its launch in 2005, it is estimated to have saved almost 400 lives and made 840,000 people safer through education about fire risks and road danger. It has also saved the taxpayer an estimated £100m.

But all it started as an idea dreamt up by Mr Etheridge and colleagues in an Abingdon coffee shop.

It was one of the first times they had ever looked in detail at road deaths, which were 'simply too high', he says.

"We started to look at the figures of people killed in the county. If you looked at 1995 to 2005, we had lost 39 people in fires but we'd lost 477 on the roads.

"Every week there was a father, mother, son or daughter being wiped out."

They put together a plan that would help them educate people most at risk. For fires this was the elderly, but for road crashes it was young people – so they set about touring the county's schools with hard-hitting presentations about the tragedy that road crashes cause.

Mr Etheridge had been left affected by one particular crash in the late 1990s involving a 21-year-old women.

He said: "All incidents stand out for different reasons, but the one that affected me most was a traffic collision I attended in the early hours of a Saturday morning."

A heavily intoxicated man had tried to drive home and hit another car head on, flinging his car into a field and killing him.

"The other vehicle was being driven by a girl, who had huge internal injuries," Mr Etheridge said. "It was a clear night with a big blue moon and I was managing the incident.

"As the girl was cut out, you could see on the surface she had barely any cuts – she looked perfect. But she went on to a stretcher and was taken away by an air ambulance and I remember thinking, 'if she dies, that is a horrendous waste of a young life'."

He picked up his son from school the next day and it transpired one of his teachers was the girl's godmother – he learnt she had died from her injuries.

"All of a sudden, you've got a connection and it hits you. I went along to the funeral, to pay my respects, which was something I had never done before.

"That incident, I would say, was the catalyst that made me want to do more on road safety. I wanted to stop another 21-year-old girl having to go through that ever again.

"One of my colleagues had also lost his son to a road collision and so we were both fired up to do something."

The campaign, 365alive, was a huge success and is now seen as model for how to get results within the service, he says.

"People in the organisation said 'how are we going to do this?' but I just thought, 'we've got to do it, because then we will stretch to meet those targets'."

Mr Etheridge believes the fire service's position as part of Oxfordshire County Council was crucial, because it had direct access to other services such as schools, social care and highways departments.

The original 365alive programme ran from 2005 to 2015, with the service hitting its targets early – but a new vision has now been developed for up to 2022.

This will aim to keep 6,000 more people alive through emergency first responding, which the fire service now assists the ambulance service with, as well as 85,000 children and young people educated about healthy living, 37,500 adults made safer through visits to their homes and 20,000 businesses given safety advice.

It is, characteristically for the fire service, a daunting challenge but one which the organisation appears to relish.

Mr Etheridge insists he had little to do with its development and, instead, it is being led by the next generation of officers and firefighters.

It's a fitting legacy for someone who says he was brought up to believe 'if someone is in trouble, you don't just walk past'.

"That culture has heavily influenced how I've been in the service. I now look at everything and think about how we could help make a difference.

"But that has gone across the whole organisation – you could talk to any firefighter now and they would talk about the massive breadth of activities they are involved in, rather than 30 years ago, when I joined, when you'd sit there waiting for things to happen.

"It makes me feel incredibly proud."