Gloucestershire’s firefighters have been kept very busy over the Christmas and New Year period, and not just fighting fires.
As well as attending house fires, the county’s fire crews:
- helped paramedics to reach patients by providing drivers and 4 x 4 vehicles which proved invaluable in getting through the ice and snow
- located and rescued a woman trapped in her car which had left the road and who didn’t know where she was on Christmas Eve
- acted quickly to prevent a fire spreading to acetylene cylinders in a workshop which meant that nearby properties did not have to be evacuated
- ensured public safety when they set up a cordon around a collapsed building, provided an aerial ladder platform to assist in the building’s assessment and sprayed mist to prevent dust cloud spreading after the building was demolished
- saved a substantial part of Gloucester’s railway station after a fire broke out in the ticket office meaning that travellers could continue to use the station on New year’s Eve
- found a man in the middle of the road, when returning from an incident, who was worse for wear through drink, cleaned him up, took him home and ensured that he was safe
- attended more than 100 flooding incidents when the thaw prompted a spate of domestic burst water pipes
- rescued a foal that had fallen through ice into a pond
Jon Hall, Deputy Chief Fire Officer, said: These are only a few of the many hundreds of incidents that the Fire & Rescue Service attended around the county between Christmas Eve and New Years Day.
“There are many examples of where firefighters have battled through atrocious weather conditions to get to their stations and make sure that calls for help from the public are answered. I believe that Gloucestershire should feel rightly proud of its firefighters”.
Cllr Will Windsor-Clive, Gloucestershire County Council Cabinet Member for Community Safety, said: “Alongside the usual incidents that firefighters are called out to, the holiday period created some unusual challenges. As well as 65 fires, our firefighters responded magnificently to the more unusual challenges they were presented with over Christmas and New Year.”
