Father hospitalised after saving disabled son from Northampton house fire
Earlier this week a father helped rescue his disabled son from a house fire in a Northampton estate and is believed to have suffered burns to his shoulder.
At 8.30pm on Tuesday night a number of properties in Arbour View Court, Thorplands, were evacuated after a blaze started in a two-storey house.
It is believed that the father rescued his three children, two of whom have cerebral palsy, before firefighters arrived who then confirmed that the family managed to escape the house before emergency services arrived.
Police have said a fire investigation is continuing and a cause of the blaze is not yet known.
Doncaster fire calls response targeted
It was announced last week that the target response times for Doncaster fire crews to attend life-threatening incidents could be axed under new proposals.
Currently the target for South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue is to attend 80 per cent of house fires or road crashes in six minutes or less which could also be extended to around 10 minutes after the brigade failed to hit the mark.
Also a third risk-based option – where communities traditionally prone to more fires have one target and those with fewer blazes a different one – is also being put out to public consultation from the beginning of this week.
The brigade – which has to save £9.5m over four years – has not met its self-set six-minute target once in six years and the report to the South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Authority said research showed response times were ‘not the main factor in preventing fire fatalities’.
Is Saving Cats a Good Use of a Fire Crew’s Time?
A very interesting article published on the IFSEC Fire website last week looked at the issue of fire crew’s saving cats.
It was prompted from a story of a fire crew in Carlisle who rescued a kitten from the engine of a car – its new owners then christened it “Miracle.” It apparently took two and a half hours to save the cat which was completely stuck.
The question being asked is how much does it cost to send a fire engine out?
An exact figure of how much a 2.5-hour call out would cost the Cumbrian council tax payer is hard to work out, but the IFSEC Fire made some informed guesses and worked out that London Fire Brigade estimates that the 40,734 false call-outs they received in 2012 cost £37 million, so on that basis the average call-out costs them about £908 — a decent approximate figure we can use for Cumbria, given no similar figures are readily available.
Cumbria Fire and Rescue Service states in its 2012/13 service plan that the minimum crew size per appliance is four. Again, pay figures from Cumbria are hard to find, but Staffordshire FRS puts its basic hourly rate for a competent firefighter is £13.
So the time the staff spent attending the incident, plus the 6 minutes average time to respond to an incident and the 9-minute drive back would have cost the fire service another £143.
This adds up to a highly approximate £1,051 to save a cat from a car bonnet.
The question is put for you to decide if this is money well spent? To read more see ww.ifsecglobal.com.
Fire at Alderley Edge Panacea celebrity restaurant ‘suspicious’
This wasn’t the first fire that took place at Panacea Alderley Edge. Following the incident in 2008 – days after it first opened a second “major blaze” at the Cheshire restaurant and bar popular with footballers and celebrities is being treated as suspicious by police.
The fire service was called to the Panacea restaurant in London Road, Alderley Edge at 22:30 GMT on Tuesday 12th March and ten fire crews tackled the blaze, which broke through the roof of the property.
Cheshire Police said no one was injured. Officers want to speak to two people who were seen to arrive in a car before the fire broke out who then were seen walking towards the building and then left in the car.
They are particularly keen to speak to anyone who was in the area at the time and saw a dark coloured BMW or Audi shortly before 22:30 GMT.”
Cheshire Fire Service said it was still damping down at the scene, with the damage to the building described as “extensive” and are now working closely with the authorities to establish the cause of the fire.
Machinery fault theory in Rotherham factory blaze probe
Following the fire that broke out on Friday 8th March fire investigators are still working to establish how the powder coatings factory, JGW Coatings, caught fire, closing a Rotherham road for several hours.
Crews cordoned off the burning building, closing Mangham Way in both directions and remaining there until 5.30pm.
A spokesman for South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue said that the fire had involved powdered plastic and that five other units on the business park were evacuated, also adding that the blaze had been extinguished quickly.
Evacuations included the five units and 12 staff members at JGW Coatings with no injuries being sustained.
The blaze is thought to have most likely been caused by a machinery fault but has been logged as accidental.