Neighbourhood police centre, S'pore's first smart fire station launched in Punggol

SINGAPORE - The familiar Red Rhino, fire engines and ambulances are on-site. But smart classrooms and an automated medical store also feature in Singapore's first smart fire station, which officially opened in Punggol on Friday (Feb 25).

Sharing space with a new neighbourhood police centre (NPC), the facility will serve as a test bed for many features and technologies for use in other stations here.

The Punggol NPC and Punggol Fire Station are part of a vision for an integrated Home Team, pooling together resources from both forces for better efficiency and coordination, said Senior Minister Teo Chee Hean.

Mr Teo, who is also Coordinating Minister for National Security, was speaking at the station's opening ceremony on Friday morning.

"As our operating environment becomes more complex, we need to take a more integrated and coordinated approach to make the best use of our resources and achieve synergies across the Home Team," he added.

At the heart of the station is a seven-storey tower - firefighters can train for various scenarios on each of its floors, which are modelled after commercial buildings, ship decks and other locations.

For instance, firefighters can train for high-rise operations using mock-ups of a typical corridor and air-conditioning ledge based on designs of Housing Board Build-to-Order flats.

The Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) said in a statement: "These common residential amenities can present challenges to the SCDF's emergency responders during the dynamic high-rise firefighting and rescue operations.

"(The tower offers) the firefighters a range of scenarios beyond the day-to-day incidents that they typically respond to and allows them to hone and sharpen their repertoire of skill sets."

In another boost to training, the station uses extended reality technology, which adds to the hands-on training that firefighters receive in the Civil Defence Academy.

Training rooms at the station are geared with interactive digital screens and virtual reality headsets that immerse firefighters in scenarios recreated digitally.

In a demonstration, firefighters donning headsets extricated a victim from a car rendered in virtual reality, using a prop of a hydraulic rescue tool to simulate cranking open a jammed door. Digital prompts on the headset's screen guide trainees to use the prop at the most effective angles on the car.

Tech is harnessed elsewhere around the station, such as in the gantry, which is equipped with facial recognition technology to free up manpower at facilities that are usually manned by staff in traditional stations.

The lights, air-conditioners and other appliances are controlled and monitored through a centralised management console that is jointly developed with the Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX).

HTX also helped set up an automated medical store, which uses sensors and trackers to manage some 10,000 dispensable items, reducing the administrative tasks involved when making withdrawals for ambulance operations.

An SCDF spokesman added that many of the features, such as the smart classroom and automated medical store, will be rolled out to other fire stations after they are tested at Punggol.

In operation since December last year, the station houses 11 emergency vehicles, including two fire engines, four ambulances and a Red Rhino, and provides emergency and rescue services to around 180,000 Punggol residents.

At the police centre, officers can draw gear needed for duty more efficiently through a smart locker system that uses two-factor authentication. 

The station has the largest green landscape area among all 23 fire stations here, with nine gardens spanning 2,500 sq m. This helped it to earn the Building and Construction Authority Green Mark Gold Award in 2020.

Punggol NPC and Punggol Fire Station are the latest in a series of joint Home Team facilities. Other examples include the Home Team Joint Facility shared at Kallang Fire Station, and the Marina Bay Fire Station within the Marina Bay NPC.