A quiet bonfire night for crews
9:38am Monday 8th November 2010 in Your Town
BONFIRE Night by David Thomson passed off relatively peacefully in Bolton— although fire crews responded to 46 callouts.
The majority of incidents involved officers attending supervised events to provide advice.
They extinguished only a small amount of bonfires for fear of them getting out of control.
A two-year-old boy sustained a minor injury to his eye when a stray firework landed in his pram on Friday night at a bonfire party at a house in Castle Street.
His quick-thinking mother poured coffee into the pram seconds after the rogue firework landed, and the youngster was taken for treatment to hospital Crew manager Mark Anderson, of Bolton North fire station, which initially responded to the incident, said the Roman candle firework involved seemed to have malfunctioned.
He said the family had followed the correct procedure and had ensured the boy’s pram was double the recommended distance away.
He said: “The firework had been put into the ground but it seems there was a definite malfunction and a projectile came out. The little lad was hit just below the eye. If it had been a centimetre higher, it would have caused him some serious damage.”
On Saturday night, a lit firework pushed inside the front door of a house at Langthorne Walk, Bolton, blew off the letterbox.
And two cars in The Haulgh were reported to have had their windscreens smashed on Friday night after fireworks were deliberately placed under their wipers Throughout Greater Manchester, fire crews responded to 180 bonfirerelated incidents between 5pm on Friday and 6am on Saturday.
There were 11 fire-related injuries and four reported attacks on firefighters, but none in the Bolton area.
Bolton Central fire station dealt with more than 20 bonfire incidents on Friday night and Saturday morning. Crew commander Carl Haslam said: “The vast majority of fires were supervised and of a reasonable size and we mostly just gave advice. There were minimum problems and the vast majority of people were well behaved.”
The same pattern was repeated elsewhere.
Bolton North officers responded to about a half dozen call-outs while colleagues at Farnworth dealt with 15-20 incidents.
Paul Duggan, of Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service, said that the brigade dealt with a total of 441 calls of all types of fire incidents between 5pm Friday and 6am on Saturday, 180 of which were bonfire-related.
He said: “Last year at this same time, we had 600 calls so, this time the figures have shown a reduction.”
● Only a handful of bonfire- related calls were handled in Bolton during Saturday night and no injuries were reported
