The money under the mattress helped fuel the house fire that killed Grandma

Firefighters at a station half a mile away who failed to send a crew when a woman died in a house fire may not have been able to save her, an inquest heard. Averil Stringer died following a fire at her home in Heamoor, Penzance, on June 19 last year from smoke inhalation.

An inquest into the death of the 76-year-old mother of two daughters, grandmother of three boys and great grandmother of a little girl, heard how a neighbor raised the alarm at 4.56am when he saw smoke rising from her home . At the time, her daughters Linzi Fletcher and her sister Krista Harvey, who has since died of cancer, expressed concern about the lack of availability of the local fire crew and wondered if it could have changed the outcome for Averil.

However, the inquest in Truro today (Thursday, May 16) was told that if the local crew had been available, they would have arrived at Averil’s home only three or four minutes earlier, when in all likelihood she would have inhaled toxic carbon monoxide for at least 20 minutes. minutes before any emergency services arrive.

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The inquest was told that Averil was in bed in the front bedroom of her home at the time of the fire, which broke out in the back bedroom of the property, and died of smoke inhalation, which may have caused her to go into traffic cardiac.

Glen Beale, a fire station manager who investigated the fire last June, said it was likely caused by an old portable tube heater attached to the baseboard next to the bed, fueled by combustible materials such as the linen, mattress and bed cover and even money that Averil had hidden under the mattress. He said the overheated low-voltage heater would have started a fire, with toxic fumes filling the house faster than the flames would have spread.

He told the hearing that smoke could have filled the house for a long time before it rose from the property and was seen by the neighbour. He said: “It is likely that the whole house was already full of smoke and it is possible that the fatal smoke inhalation occurred before the eyewitness got his phone. It doesn’t take many breaths to affect people. It might only take one or two or three breaths of toxic fumes to bring on the unconsciousness that would disable a person.”

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Steve Swan, group manager at Cornwall Fire and Rescue Service, responsible for west Cornwall at the time of the incident, told the inquest that three engines were sent to the fire, as is standard procedure for house fires when people are suspected of is inside.

He said the nearest on-call fire crew, in this case Penzance Fire Station, would have been alerted. However, on this occasion – something he said was not out of the ordinary due to the staffing constraints facing the fire service – the crew was unable to reunite as one of the team members became unavailable until 3 in the morning so you can rest. enough to go to the main job a few hours later.

Mr Swan told the inquest that as a result the call was passed to the nearest available fire station – St Just. Two other crews were also alerted and headed to the blaze in St Ives and Tolvaddon in Camborne.

He said the St Just crew were at Averil’s home within 17 minutes and 45 seconds of the initial 999 call being made. Within minutes of entering Averil’s property, she was found unconscious and lifeless, she was removed and CPR was begun.

The inquest heard that St Just fire crews performed CPR on Averil for more than 20 minutes while an ambulance made its way through and again for a further 15 minutes with paramedics before she was pronounced dead. He said it was highly likely that Averil was already dead by the time firefighters arrived, but firefighters are not medically and legally qualified to say whether someone is alive or dead.

Mr Swan told the inquest that on-call crews are contracted to do a certain amount of hours a year between 7pm and 7am, but occasionally they may call to say they are no longer available for the rest of the shift due to work constraints from their side. main job.

He told the inquiry: “We don’t have an infinite supply of firefighters who want to be on-call firefighters who have to live within six minutes of a fire station. We can only have a certain number available per station due to budget constraints, so we rely on what we have available, including the skill sets available per station.”

Mr Swan said the housing crisis and the cost of living had made recruiting firefighters, particularly on-call firefighters, a massive problem for the county’s fire service, with rurality and geography also playing a role.

He told the hearing that 85% of the time (which is above the 70% target), day crews meet their 11-minute response time and on-call crews meet their own 16-minute response time. Only two fire stations out of 31 in Cornwall (at Tolvaddon and Falmouth) are manned 24/7. The other 29 stations retained daytime crews and on-call crews after 7 p.m.

Mr Swan told the hearing that recruitment has been a problem for the fire service, particularly for on-call firefighters, and the Covid years have changed the way people work, which is not always compatible with the constraints and sacrifices required for the role .

He added: “It’s a big sacrifice. My hat’s off to them because they’ll be missing birthdays, barbecues with friends, or lost wages due to self-employment. It gets tiring after a while and for some people they realize. no it’s for them.

“We can’t have a fire engine in every area of ​​Cornwall and be able to deal with every fire that happens. There are times when we won’t be able to be there, so it would be naive to say that this scenario could not happen again. .”

He said that while an increased budget would not go amiss, the service’s measures in place were proportionate to the risk given Cornwall’s rurality and geography. Linzi Fletcher, Averil’s daughter, said for her family it was never about the firefighters, it was about time and whether having the Penzance crew on hand would have made a difference.

She told the hearing: “My family is grateful to the fire crews who risked their lives to save my mother. No words can express how grateful we are and how humbled we are by their courage. You are heroes. We are extremely sorry for the Penzance Crew who were unable to attend for reasons beyond their control.”

She added: “As a family we are full of praise for the fire service. You were there on your own. We feel let down by the ambulance service. My mother may not have been brought back and we’ll never know if, the ambulance crew had been there earlier, she could have been brought back, but it took them 23 minutes to get there.”

Guy Davies, deputy coroner for Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, said Averil was likely to have passed out from the toxic fumes before emergency services arrived at her home, especially when all it takes to pass someone out is less than four breaths. He said: “The house would have been full of smoke before the eyewitness saw it. It is likely that Averil would have died before the first fire crew arrived. It would have made no difference if the Penzance crew had been available.”

Concluding in an accidental death, Mr Davies added: “I commend the firefighters from both stations for their courage in entering the property and their efforts to save Averil.”