A blaze of glory

The recent fires above Conwy that you could both see and smell from Llandudno were the cause of much debate, but that debate does lend an interesting perspective to the whole business of statistics. 

In the Daily post ,operations manager Gareth Wyn Griffiths  claimed 245 appliances or fire engines were called out at £340 a time, a total of £83,300. Though most fires were attended by full-time firefighters, many were tackled by part-time crews. It costs around £100 an hour for a crew of five part-time, or retained, firefighters – making the cost even higher.

He also noted - somewhat self-deprecatingly "We are coping with the strain through successful management, but these fires could be tying up firefighters and resources needed to save lives elsewhere."

It's always tempting to swallow stats like those without asking some pertinent questions. So we'll do that.

The claim that "245 appliances or fire engines were called out at £340 a time, a total of £83,300" assumes they cost nothing to be left in their sheds, or wherever, so we're presumably expected to deduce that the cost of £83,300 is down to petrol.  Now, prices have risen in the past year, but that seems rather a lot for fuel.  Or is that the hire charge for a fire engine? Curiously, fire engines do move when they're aren't any fires. in fact, North Wales doesn't have that many fires, which is why we have few full-time firemen, so those that work within the fire service spend a lot of their time rehearsing.  These fires probably provided some real on-the-job training opportunities for them.

But his subsequent observation that "… these fires could be tying up firefighters and resources needed to save lives elsewhere," implies that if your house catches fire and granny is left screaming for help from the attic, the gorse fires come first. So what was that about "successful management"?

Fire fighting's a dangerous job, and those who do it deserve their accolades, but reducing incidents to the level of ticket-punting and bald financial figures does little to generate real concern over the real issues of gorse burning during a drought and can deflect attention from the seriousness of mountain fires in general.