Fire can have long term devastating effects and can strike anywhere, from peoples' homes to commercial businesses. West Midlands Fire Service constantly monitors and analyses property risk in order to assist with predicting future trends. This enables us to be proactive in carrying out targeted fire prevention work in key areas and sectors to help to reduce risk from both accidental and intentionally set fires and make the West Midlands safer as a whole. To view analysis and commentary relating to fires in domestic properties across the West Midlands Metropolitan area, please click on the links below:-
Accidental Dwelling Fires
Arson in Residential Premises
A key way of reducing the risk of fires in domestic premises is provision of fire safety education to groups in the community that are potentially more vulnerable to fire, directly in their homes. This is known as a Home Safety Check. To find out more about these, please click here.
Commercial and industrial fires are targeted differently. One significant preventative tool used to do this is the ‘Risk Based Inspection Program’ or RBiP. We use this data-based system to examine past trends describing the vulnerability to fire from different sectors of industry, commerce and other non-domestic premises, together with a weighting process to give higher priority to places with a significant risk to life.
We can then use the resulting information to guide the audit and inspection work conducted by our specialist fire safety officers who operate out of local centres in Birmingham, the Black Country, Solihull and Coventry.
They can give advice to site managers and those responsible for fire safety in the business sector, or audit the standard of management with regard to fire safety for the occupants of a given site. Where the standard is found to be unacceptable, this can lead us to commence the enforcement process, proportionate to the potential for harm, but ultimately ending with prosecution, or prohibition from using the premises if the site is deemed to be dangerous
We are also actively involved in monitoring safety where hazardous materials are traded, such as fireworks and petroleum.
To find out more about the RBiP and how it helps to reduce risk in commercial premises, please click here.
The West Midlands metropolitan area is also host to a number of historically and culturally valuable buildings such as museums, galleries and listed buildings. WMFS continually analyse risk and gather intelligence to ensure that such properties are protected and that incidents such as Shannons Mill (Walsall, August 2007) are avoided. One of the ways of collecting this intelligence is through Site Risk Identification
Another type of property that may be involved in an emergency incident is a vehicle. Recent predictions estimate that traffic in our brigade area is set to increase significantly over time, with even higher rates of vehicle ownership and usage. It is therefore imperative that we monitor traffic flows and accident hotspots in order to help forecast future trends. This allows us to put in place targeted interventions that reduce the risk of Road Traffic Collisions as well as the number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads. To view analysis and commentary relating to Road Traffic Collisions across the West Midlands Metropolitan area, please click here.
Vehicles are also sometimes a target for arsonists and many of the fires that we deal with from year to year, involve cars and vans, especially where these have been stolen or abandoned. Again, we have achieved high levels of success in reducing the number of vehicle fires in recent years, assisted by the improvements in vehicle security and the currently high level of the price of scrap metal, which encourages people to arrange for disposal of an old car, rather than abandoning it where it can be set alight.
The Arson Task Force that we run in partnership with West Midlands Police, has helped us to drive down property risk in a number of ways, by giving sound advice to those in the business community, as well as managers of schools and other sites that have become targets for arson attack in recent years. The WM Arson Task Force offer a service to local communities whereby they give advice on a range of issues to improve resilience against arson, by improving security, target hardening or changing the way that refuse is managed. They also produce a range of excellent guidance documents that can be downloaded or obtained as hard copy.
We have a specialist team of fire investigators that look into the cause of many of the fires that we attend, so that we improve our knowledge of the causes of fire, but also so that we can assist in pursuing arsonists and bringing them to justice. We have access to a dedicated sniffer dog to help identify where accelerants have been used at a crime scene involving fire, so that we can carry out a thorough investigation of the site and gather forensic evidence to help in prosecution cases.
