Estonian Rescue Board (ERB)

Description

The ‘birthday’ of the Estonian Rescue Board is deemed to be 25 May 1992, when the Government of the Republic of Estonia issued a decree on the liquidation of the State Fire Service Board and on the transfer of its assets and functions to the National Rescue Board. This completed the two-year-old reform process for the reorganisation of the Soviet firefighting system, combining the two main autonomous areas in this field: fire protection and civil defence. The Civil Air Defence and the Fire Department, which was established in 1937 and in which the functions of firefighting and civil defence were also united, can be regarded as a distant predecessor of the Estonian Rescue Board in the Republic of Estonia.

To understand the development of the Estonian Rescue Board, we should go back in time further than the year 1992 and take a look at the end of the Soviet period. The management body of firefighting was the Firefighting Administration under the Ministry of the Interior, which was renamed the Fire Fighting Board of the Ministry of the Interior in 1990. Despite the name change, it maintained the organisation’s former structure and working principles. In the civil defence field, a civil defence system was operating under the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Estonian SSR, whose governing structure was the Civil Defence Staff of the ESSR, which, in turn, was subordinated to the respective staffs operating at the executive committees of the Congress of People’s Deputies of the districts and under the authority of the Republic. The Cold War-era civil defence organisation had, by that time, exhausted its capacities as the focus of civil defence has shifted from military dangers to crisis management and eliminating of the consequences of a disaster, which, in turn, has led to extensive rescue-related reforms throughout the world. One of the first steps was joining civil defence to the firefighting department in Sweden in 1986; the Swedish experience continued to play an important part in the reorganisation of the Estonian civil defence system in the early 1990s.