Issue - meetings

To receive a report and presentation on behalf of the Chief Fire Officer regarding the Ocado fire that took place in February 2019.

The Authority received a report and presentation regarding the Ocado Fire that occurred in February 2019 (item 7 in the minute book).

The report and presentation covered experiences and lessons gained from the incident, which lasted four days. The technology, cause of the fire and how and where it occurred made it the largest scale and most complicated incident that the Service had dealt with.

Members were taken through the four day period and the steps undertaken at each stage. In total, seven different Fire and Rescue Services were involved, with up to 20 appliances at the scene.

As complications with the integrity of the roof and risks around ammonia became apparent on the second day, a major incident was declared and local residents were evacuated from the area. Once the ammonia had been removed and the area had been secured on day three, the severity of the incident was lessened again.

The Authority was shown a map with the resource footprint required for the incident, which extended to beyond the County boundary and the different organisations were thanked again for their support. Over 100 hours of debriefing had taken place since the incident with three key areas of learning being focussed on:

·         The importance of developing Firefighter technologies to keep up to date with advancing technology nationally and particularly in the commercial sector;

·         The scale and duration of the incident (particularly around water resources) and maintaining a ‘business as usual’ service throughout; and

·         Looking further at discussions around building regulations and earlier consultation with planning considerations.

Members agreed that there was a lot of learning to be taken from the incident and the Chief Fire Officer enforced the importance of finding a balance with early involvement with planning and building regulations. Ocado had been very cooperative with investigations and due to there not being a change of use, there had been no requirement for an inspection when they took over the building.

RESOLVED:

a)    The contents of the report and presentation were noted by Hampshire Fire and Rescue Authority.

b)    That the Chief Fire Officer be delegated to share the presentation and further learnings from the Ocado incident with other organisations and interested parties as appropriate.