Holmsey

Making a drama out of a crisis?

Firefighters dedicate themselves to serving us and we’re thankful to see them arrive in a crisis. As a child, my Mum had one of those air-drying frames you hang washing on; one day she placed it a little too close to our open fire, and a sudden gust of wind blew the laundry onto the flames. As a six-year-old, the sight of a fleet of fire engines arriving at a gallop outside our house made quite an impression on me.

Five years later, at school, another pupil ran towards me yelling, “Your house has burnt down.” I sprinted home immediately to find our house had indeed caught fire. This time my Mum had been working night duty at the police station; she came home, switched on her electric blanket and fell into bed, not realising she was laying on a serious electrical fault. During her morning slumber, the telephone rang downstairs. She woke and opened her bedroom door; the sudden rush of oxygen ignited the bed. By the time she reached the foot of the stairs, there was quite a blaze behind her. She answered the telephone with, “I can’t speak to you now; the house is on fire,” before abruptly hanging up and dialing 999. When I arrived home breathless, the road was jammed with fire appliances and hoses but, thankfully, the blaze was extinguished. We had a sizeable hole in the roof and all of the upstairs bedrooms were completely charred, soaked and soot-damaged. The ground floor was just as black, with an overwhelming stench of acrid, burning smoke. All of our possessions were destroyed, either by the fire or the water used to extinguish it. As a consequence very few pictures of my siblings and me exist; only those taken afterwards, or those my grandparents had, but at least there are very few to embarrass me!

So I have more reason than most to be grateful for firefighters, and that 9/11 New York firehouse documentary, which was coincidentally being made just as the aircraft struck the towers, made me weep for those I saw making the ultimate sacrifice.

Recently, I left my mainland office and was overtaken by a speeding fire engine. As I joined the M3, I saw it was parked behind another ‘pump’ on the hard shoulder, close to Fleet services. The cause of the shout was a small camper van, and as the traffic was at a crawl, you could see a minor fire had been safely extinguished. I crept past, grateful that the Highways Agency hadn’t yet arrived to ‘manage’ the slow-moving traffic into complete chaos, and saw a third engine arrive. On my journey south, I saw a further four appliances racing pell-mell northbound – two coming from Basingstoke, two more from as far south as Winchester. That’s a total of seven fire engines. Do you think that’s a proportionate response to the scene of a small van fire, 30-40 minutes after it seemed to be out?

Last week, a chip pan caught fire on the Red Osprey ferry. Thankfully it was quickly extinguished by the crew but, regardless, six fire engines, five special appliances and seven senior officer cars raced from all over Hampshire to the Red Funnel terminal, just to watch the ferry dock safely. Didn’t any of those emergency vehicles receive en-route updates from HQ?

Multiple fire appliances keep rushing to incidents. The recent thatch fire in Calbourne saw three sent over from the mainland. Are all these vehicles really necessary when there’s no apparent danger, other than to those in the path of the fire service vehicles going like the clappers? What a tragic irony if they should kill someone!