Garages destroyed in village fire

A huge fire broke out in a row of garages in Langford, Bedfordshire at around 6pm on 3rd March.

Many homes had to be evacuated by police and the village’s main road closed. Bedfordshire and Luton Fire Service attended the incident.

A spokesperson for the fire service said: “There was a block of four brick garages that were on fire at the rear of the houses. We sent two fire crews from Biggleswade and one from Shefford. We also had other support vehicles from Bedford that were there because of the scale of the incident. One of the garages was thought to have cylinders in it of liquid petroleum gas and acetylene. When cylinders are involved there is the potential that they could explode and in that situation we evacuate the vicinity. People were evacuated in the 200m vicinity to make sure that if they were to explode there would be no injuries. We had a number of ground monitors and jets. Water was put on to the fire and it was declared safe at 1.36am.”

Due to the buildings containing gas cylinders, it took fire crews longer to control the fire, but residents were allowed to go back to their homes, three hours after they were evacuated.

The cause of the fire is not yet known.