Fire cover at an airfield
Every licensed aerodrome in the country has to provide rescue and fire fighting cover, and the level of cover is set by the size of the aircraft that use it. This is the RFFS: the Rescue and Fire Fighting Service, the fire crews whose job is not to protect buildings but to reach an aircraft that has crashed or caught fire, and to get the people inside it out.
At an airfield like Barton the requirement is far lower than at an international airport, because the aircraft are small. A light aircraft carries a handful of people and a limited amount of fuel, and the response needed is correspondingly modest: a rapid intervention vehicle with a foam and water capacity suited to a small fire, and a crew who can be at the scene within the regulated response time from anywhere on the airfield.
What makes airfield fire fighting different from any other kind is the emphasis on speed and on foam. Aircraft fires involve large quantities of fuel in a confined space, and the people inside have very little time. The principle is to reach the aircraft, lay a blanket of foam over the fuel and the fire, and create enough of a gap for a rescue. Everything about the vehicles and the training follows from that.
Foam, not water
Water alone is largely useless on a fuel fire: it sinks below burning fuel and spreads it rather than extinguishing it. Foam does the opposite, forming a film on the surface that cuts off the oxygen supply. Airfield fire vehicles therefore carry a large proportion of foam concentrate, and the fire crews spend much of their training practising how to apply it fast enough to matter.
Barton’s grass surface adds one more consideration. Grass fires spread quickly in dry weather, and a crashed aircraft on grass can start one in a matter of seconds, so crews at a grass airfield have to deal with two problems at once.
The large fire at a pallet yard, 2 September 2002
Airfield fire cover is a specialised job, but the busiest incidents in this area were ordinary urban fires at industrial premises — and in September 2002 there was a large one very close to Barton.
The fire was at Chep UK, a pallet storage yard in Trafford Park, on 2 September 2002. At its height over 100 firefighters and 25 pumps were tackling the blaze. A pallet yard is close to the worst possible fire for a fire service to fight: a very large quantity of dry, stacked timber, arranged in a way that lets air move freely through it, with nothing to stop the fire spreading from one stack to the next.
One detail from the incident says a great deal about how fires of this scale are fought. A pump took water from the Bridgewater Canal, nearly a mile away from the fire, because no mains supply could deliver the volume required. Moving water from a canal to a fire a mile away is a substantial logistical exercise in its own right, and it is why large industrial fires tie up so many appliances for so long.
What has changed since
Fire cover arrangements at Barton and across Greater Manchester have been reorganised in the years since, as they have nationally. Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service has merged stations, changed its appliance fleet and moved to different response models; airfield fire cover at Barton continues to meet the regulatory requirement for the aircraft that operate there.
Trafford Park remains one of the largest concentrations of industrial premises in the country, and the same category of incident — a fire in a large, low, timber-filled building — remains one of the most demanding things a fire service can be called to.
