Balcony Fires 2021/22

Ref: FOI/22086

RE: FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT 2000 REQUEST  

West Midlands Fire Service has now completed its search for the information requested on 10^th August 2022

Please find below a summary of our findings.

Request.

Please supply me with data relating to fires on balconies on residential buildings in your area, as follows;

· How many fires involving balconies occurred in total between 1st August 2021 and 31st July 2022?

If your incident recording system does not include "balcony" as a recorded location, could you please perform a search on free text fields in your database for the term, as I have found in the past that this often returns useable data.

Reply

Due to ‘balcony’ not being a recognised FDR location within our incident workbook a manual check of STOP messages where the word ‘balcony’ was mentioned has been completed; this resulted in 4 incidents being identified between 1st August 2021 and 31st July 2022.

Please note that as this is a manual check and there may be some incidents that have been missed or not identified due to spelling errors within the STOP message.

Request

In the same period, how many fires occurred where balconies where found to have contributed to the spread of the fire across the external walls?

Reply

This information is exempt under section 1 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 as we do not hold this information. We do not record any information around the spread of fire and this level of detail would not be mentioned within an incident log

Request

Please provide data on the causes of any fires that started on balconies in the period (ie; barbecue, discarded cigarette, electrical appliance fault, etc) and please

provide the number of occurrences for each cause.

Reply

The four balcony fire incidents causes were a tumble dryer fire and three careless disposals of a cigarettes

If you have any queries about this freedom of information request, please contact us.  Please remember to quote the reference number above in any future communications.

For service complaints, issues or comments regarding this request please contact The Public Relations Department, West Midlands Fire Service, 99 Vauxhall Road, Birmingham, B7 4HW

Further information concerning Freedom of Information requests can be found on the Information Commissioner website at either the following link: https://ico.org.uk/ or at Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, SK9 5AF.