Fire protection

The responsible bodies are

• the municipalities for fire protection and general assistance,
• the rural districts for supra-local fire protection and supra-local general assistance,
• the districts and independent cities for civil protection and
• the federal state for the central tasks of fire protection, general assistance and disaster control as well as for the tasks of preventive hazard protection. In order to fulfill its central tasks, the state has set up a "Fire and Disaster Protection" department at the Supervisory and Service Directorate in Trier and maintains the Fire and Disaster Protection School in Koblenz for training purposes.

The fire departments are to be financed by the responsible authority. They receive financial assistance from the state - from funds from the fire protection tax and the investment fund - for the procurement of firefighting equipment, personal protective equipment and for the construction or renovation of fire stations.

Professional fire department: In cities with more than 90,000 inhabitants - Kaiserslautern, Koblenz, Ludwigshafen, Mainz and Trier - the fire department must comprise units of full-time firefighters (professional fire department). Other municipalities can set up a professional fire department.

Volunteer fire department: In municipalities without a professional fire department, a volunteer fire department must be set up. If there are not enough volunteers available for this, the necessary people must be called up for voluntary fire department ("compulsory fire department"). Larger cities that are not (yet) obliged to have a professional fire department due to their population are in many cases forming volunteer fire departments with full-time firefighters, e.g. Neuwied, Worms, Speyer and Pirmasens.

Plant fire department: For companies with increased fire or explosion hazards or other special dangers, the supervisory and service directorate can require the establishment of a plant fire department (examples: BASF, Boehringer, Schott-Glas plant fire departments) with full-time and/or part-time members.

The training and further training of the Rhineland-Palatinate fire departments is carried out as a network system between the individual responsible bodies, starting with the site training and district training through to the central training at the fire department and disaster control school in Koblenz

In future, all non-police requests for assistance will be received and coordinated by eight integrated control centers. The integrated control centers will thus form a uniform reporting head.