Posts tagged: News

According to the latest Home Office figures, almost one thousand UK firefighters were attacked while attending incidents, putting attacks on firefighters at their highest since records began.

Between March 2021 and April 2022, 983 incidents were reported – which is an increase of five per cent on the previous year. These resulted in 60 injuries, with some requiring a hospital stay.  Around 20 per cent of attacks take place around Bonfire Night, and services are reporting attacks throughout the year.

In a recent incident, crews in Tyne and Wear were called to a car fire which was a pile of rubbish which had been set alight. Firefighters were then barricaded in and attacked with petrol bombs, glass bottles and rubble. Police also came under attack when they arrived.

Chris Lowther, NFCC’s Chair of Operations Committee and Chief Fire Officer for Tyne and Wear said:  “To see attacks is abhorrent and to see the numbers are at their highest ever is disgraceful. Firefighters are mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters – they do not deserve to be treated like this.  

“If a firefighter is injured or a fire appliance is damaged, fire services have less people and resources available. This is putting lives in danger; our blue light services are here to keep people safe. 

“I am urging everyone to treat our firefighters with respect and for parents, teachers and adults to drive this message home. Attacking a firefighter or damaging a fire engine could be the difference between our crews being able to reach a fire.”  

Lowther also called for stronger sentences to handed down by the courts in instances where restorative justice has not worked: “Jail sentences for attacks on emergency services workers are very rare; this needs to change to send a clear message this will not be tolerated.” 

Ten people, including five children aged three to 15, were killed in a fire in the early hours of Friday in a residential apartment building in Vaulx-en-Velin, near the French city of Lyon, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said.

Another four people were seriously injured in the fire, which started on the ground floor before spreading up the seven-storey building, Reuters reported.

The fire, which broke out at around 3am local time has now been extinguished. 170 firefighters were involved int he extinguishing effort.

The BBC reported that the block of flats where the fire broke out is part of a housing project in the Lyon suburbs. The flames appear to have started on the ground floor before spreading upwards.

New data has revealed that a practice which allows fire service bosses to halt pension contributions and receive tax-free payments has been used in 13 fire and rescue services, despite the the government having formally discouraged the practice in England.

The Fire Brigade’s Union explained that this involves predominantly senior fire officers retiring and then being re-appointed into the same or a similar post, in arrangement with their employer. It allows them to access a quarter of their pension pot as a tax-free lump sum and then return to post and cease paying employee pension contributions.  The employing fire and rescue authority also ceases to pay pension contributions.   

The 13 services includes London, the biggest wholetime fire service in the UK, where five high level ranking officers including the Commissioner have retired then been re-engaged in the service. Some of these occurrences of retire and rehire may have taken place before the government’s formal discouragement. The data comes from Freedom of Information requests made by the Fire Brigades Union.

Matt Wrack, Fire Brigades Union general secretary, said: “It is outrageous that bosses in fire and rescue services are being allowed to rob taxpayers in this way. It’s deeply unfair and unjust, that bosses on six figure salaries are making cosy agreements that the firefighters they preside over could never hope for.

“FBU members will be furious that this is continuing despite the government formally saying it shouldn’t. FBU members have suffered pay restraint for over a decade, with chief officers standing idly by and doing nothing to demand better for their employees. That bosses have been able to play the system to make themselves even richer when ordinary workers are struggling to make ends meet is truly abhorrent.”

The fire and rescue services that reported that the practice is being or has been used are: Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, East Sussex, Humberside, Lancashire, London, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, South Yorkshire, West Sussex and West Yorkshire

The government, in the 2018 Fire and rescue national framework for England following a consultation, formally discouraged this practice and affirmed that it should be utilised only in “exceptional circumstances when such a decision is necessary in the interests of public safety”.

At least eleven students were killed and six others were in critical condition due to a fire in a school for the blind in central Uganda, according to Reuters.

The fire broke out around 1am at the Salaama School for the Blind in Mukono, about 30 km east of the capital Kampala. The cause is so far unknown, police said in a statement.

Internal Affairs Minister General Kahinda Otafiire told AFP that most of the dead are children at the school. He said that the school had been cordoned off as a crime scene and a full investigation is to be launched.

“As government we shall go to the root cause of the fire and if there are any culprits they will be apprehended and the law will take its course,” he added.

Dr Moses Keeya, who works at the local hospital that first received the injured, said that those admitted sustained mostly injuries on the arms, legs and chest, whilst one has a deep burn on their head.

Four children have been referred to Kiruddu National Hospital in Kampala. Two who had minor injuries have been discharged and sent home.

A fire broke out at a market in Daegu, South Korea on Tuesday night, affecint nearly 70 stores. No casualties were reported.

According to local reports, it is thought that the fire started in a storage area in a building in the Daegu Agriculture and Fisheries Wholesale Market on at around 8:30pm.  Nearly 250 firefighters and 90 fire engines were dispatched to the scene. The main blaze was extinguished at around 9:43pm and the fire was completely out by 11:59pm.

The three-storey building houses 152 stores, most of which sell fruit. Around 70 stores across 8,000 square meters (1.98 acres) were affected.

According to Koreas JoongAng Daily, witnesses on the scene told police that they heard a loud explosion followed by thick smoke filling the air.

Daegu police and firefighters said they would open a joint investigation to probe the cause of the blaze and determine whether the building’s safety systems worked properly. Firefighters told local reporters that the building’s walls appeared to have been made out of flammable materials causing the quick spread of fire.

The Daegu Agriculture and Fisheries Wholesale Market is the largest agriculture and fisheries wholesale market outside the Seoul metropolitan area and the third-largest in the entire country.
 
Total damages caused by the blaze have yet to be calculated however a fire at the same building in August 2013 impacted 32 out of 80 stores and resulted in around 1 billion won worth of losses.