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>> Louis Minchella: We've been called to a fire in a thatched roof of the property behind
me, and as you can see there's been quite a significant fire. Crews are currently in
the process of stripping the thatch away from the roof to gain access to the fire. The fire
is actually contained within the thatched material which makes it quite tricky. It's
very time consuming and difficult to actually get to fires of this nature. Thatch fires
are very difficult fires to deal with. The depth of the thatch causes us a very considerable
problem, as you can see behind, there's an awful lot of material being dragged off the
roof. It can be anything up to 18 inches thick in places and the only way to get a fire out
of it, is to drag it off and put it out on the ground. Good fire detection in the form
of smoke detectors inside the property is as good as you're going to get for any type
of property warning you against fire. Thatch fires are particularly dangerous in the fact
that they can spread undetected inside the thatch material and along and cause considerable
damage. So the right kind of smoke detection will assist you with that. One of the first
things that we tend to think about, apart from fire fighting, is the contents of the
property are likely to get damaged in this kind of fire. We have to put quite a lot of
water on the property, we have to expose a lot of the property through the roof and the
fire can spread down inside the roof as well. So one of our primary concerns is to clear
away (what we call salvage) the owner's property from inside the building and take it away
to a safe area. So that if the fire does spread any further, that it's not a complete loss
for the owners. The owner and occupiers left the property safely. Their fire alarms did
sound and warned them of the fire in the roof and everybody was evacuated from the surrounding
properties as well.