Vehicle fires for parked vehicles

Received 11 April 2023

Request

I would like to request under the Freedom of Information Act data held by Staffordshire Fire and Rescue Service on vehicle fires attended by your emergency crews for the financial years 2017-18 to 2022-23 inclusive. The information I am seeking relates directly to vehicles which have caught fire either while parked or while in use. An example would be a car which catches fire while parked outside a house or a car which catches fire while driving along the road.

I am not looking for information on vehicles which have been deliberately set alight or that have caught fire after being involved in a road traffic collision.

I would like information held by Staffordshire Fire and Rescue Service broken down into the following categories:

• Type/Class of vehicle (such as Car/SUV/MPV/Van/HGV)
• Make: (Such as Ford/Vauxhall/Mercedes/LandRover)
• Model: (Such as Mondeo/Corsa/E-Class/Discovery)
• Fuel: (Such as Petrol/Diesel/LPG/Hydrogen/Hybrid/Electric)

I would also like information as to whether the vehicle fire caused any casualties / fatalities or caused damage to other vehicles / buildings.

Response

Please see separate Excel spreadsheet with the following explanatory notes:

Fire Source – Part of vehicle where fire started

DamAdjOnArrivalDistance – On arrival – If any adjacent properties were damaged at the time of arrival how far were they (m)

DamAdjOnStopDistance – At end of incident – If any adjacent properties were damaged by the end of the incident, how far away were they (m)

InjuriesReporting – Where a casualty has gone to hospital

Make model of vehicle is blank on some occasions due to the system only being populated with makes and models of vehicles at the inception of the software and has not been updated since– new models of cars may account for some of these blanks. Another reason for the missing information may be that the vehicle was completely burnt out and unidentifiable, also it is not a mandatory field.

If the fire spread from vehicle to building of a higher value than the vehicle then it will be recorded as a building fire and tracing the source back to vehicle in the data would take more time than is allowed for an FOI.