Changes made by London fire service after Wennington blaze

Following devastating grass fires in the Capital, the London Fire Brigade is making big changes to the way it operates, in case we see the same again this year.

The village of Wennington in east London was one of the worst hit areas when a compost fire on the hottest day since records began, quickly spread destroying 19 homes.

The Deputy Commissioner of LFB said the speed of the blaze on 19th July was something he 'hadn't seen in 24 years' in his fire service career and told the London Assembly it's prompted a raft of changes.

“This includes everything from the types of equipment that we’re looking at, to try and bring online, from the PPE that we’re going to be using to make sure that firefighters have got the protection that they need.”

Jonathan Smith added that the LFB was taking expert advice from the National Fire Chiefs Council, to give officers improved training on the specific challenges of wildfires.

At one point during the blaze, the fire was seen leaping across a two-lane road from one side to the other.

Baroness Fiona Twycross, London’s Deputy Mayor for Fire and Resilience, said barriers like the two-lane road, which runs through the middle of the village, would previously have been assumed to be “natural breaks” to help contain the fire, but that this thinking had been challenged by the events at Wennington.

Andrew Blake-Herbert, chief executive of Havering Council – which includes Wennington within its area – admitted there was a “unique set of circumstances there on that day, with the wind and the heat at the same time, that did add to the nature of the fire, and the outcome that came about.”

Deputy commissioner Smith said part of the difficulty in tackling the blaze at Wennington was also the number of other incidents taking place across London at the same time.

“The incident at Wennington was actually one of 15 significant incidents across the whole of London on 19 July, which the LFB had to respond to,” he said.

“As far as the Wennington fire specifically was concerned, we mobilised 15 appliances fire engines. There were somewhere in the region of 100 firefighters tackling that blaze within Wennington.”

He added that he visited the village the day after the fire and said that “you couldn’t help but be completely moved by what I actually saw there, in terms of houses completely destroyed. People had lost all of their worldly possessions”.

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