Hiya, my name is Phil Nelson. I've worked for Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service for 21 years. I'm going to talk to you today about an incident that occurred at a school that was quite local to where I live.
I was sat in the office undertaking my normal duties and I heard the fire engines go out from the station and all sorts of things run through your mind at that time. What type of incident is it? How big is it? I also knew there were quite a few schools at the same location, and I remember getting there and thinking 'this is going to be a really bad job if we don't stop the fire spread as soon as possible'.
There was thick black smoke pluming up from the school. I could see Firefighters trying to get water on to the fire, to stop it from spreading. I then found out that the actual school that was affected was one that I knew very well. I go there and have gone there with my children and actually it's a school for young children with special requirements and I'm taking in a lot of information when I first arrive at an incident - where my Firefighters are in the building, how safe they are. It involved a roof space - whether the roof was going to collapse.
As we went along we were made aware of lots of special equipment that the children relied on in that school. Things like electric wheelchairs and other specialist equipment, that without this equipment - very expensive equipment - their lives would be affected dramatically. And the main school had a huge gym area and all these things when you're being told that this could be affected and be burnt to the ground you just realise how many people wider than that school it's going to affect.
People who come there every single day, every single week, to utilise the facilities not just in the local area but wider than that. So thousands of people really. Somebody then made me aware that there's some CCTV footage and the footage showed some young people, 14 and 15 years old, and they had lit a fire at the back of the school and left. The CCTV footage showed these children lighting some polystyrene chip papers or something like that, on some artificial grass which started off really small and later on they'd said they were just too lazy to go back and put this fire out.
But that spread very quickly up the wall of the school and into the roof space. I remember going into the school later in the incident, when we had the majority of the fire out, and my thoughts were of my memories of walking into a lovely clean school with lovely artwork upon the walls, loads of pictures that all the children had done at that school. Big fish tank, lots of lovely things. Walking into that school after that fire was heart-breaking. All the artwork was just on the floor, soaking wet, black stained walls, the smell of the smoke and the flames that had ripped through that school was just devastating.
At that point I also knew that it was some young people that had set that fire deliberately, and I knew at that point that they could not possibly know of how many people's lives they had affected by lighting that fire that day. I remember thinking what would happen if this was in normal school time and people would have been in this building? You know, we would have really struggled to rescue all those people, especially the ones with difficulties, disabled difficulties, to get out of that burning building.
Smoke travels much faster than fire and the smoke is so dangerous, it contains lots and lots of toxins and just a few breaths of that smoke would make you go unconscious, and you would fall down and possibly end up dead. Now if you lit a fire, thinking it was a bit of a joke, and actually it affected lots of people who ended up injured or even dead, the consequences would be much more serious. And that's what you've got to think about when you're messing about with the emergency services, either making hoax calls or lighting small fires that you think won’t affect anybody, you could end up injuring or killing somebody.
