Fire Fire

When churches catch fire, it’s usually due to either an electrical fault or arson. When I was visiting a church a few days ago the archivist told me how very severe damage was caused to the building in the 1990s when someone pushed burning paper through a letterbox which, eccentrically, led into a vestry, and onto a carpet, and from there the flames led to the organ and the woodwork. Vandals have made their presence felt at Swanvale Halt but it’s actually quite hard to set large bits of wood alight: near the candle stand is a scorch mark on the floor where a lighted taper was left burning, but that’s all it did; while on another occasion an Easter Garden was burned but the 17^th-century chest it sat on wasn’t so much as marked. You need a lot of heat to make an impression and a single candle, or even a bagful of candles, won’t do it. Electrical faults are another matter: you try to carry out the inspections at the right time and check the often antique arrangements of the organ, and trust that the risk is fairly low, at least when someone is present in the building.

Low, but not absent. We’ve been aware for some time that our fire precautions – in terms of what to do in the remote eventuality of something happening while the building is in use – need to be tightened up. We had a survey done towards the end of 2019, and I filled out our insurer’s risk assessment template, but then the pandemic intervened and everything ground to a halt. Over the last few weeks, as we suddenly twigged that a range of concerts and other events were coming up, the whole issue lurched into life again. Another consultant visited and did a lot of estimation how many people could get out of our exits: the big clear-out we had recently brought another underused doorway into realistic play for the first time, which helped. Sandra in the office has worked very hard coming up a rough emergency plan, we now have relatively discreet exit signs over the doors, and I have briefed the hirers.

It is vanishingly unlikely that anything could actually happen during an event like a concert: a far greater risk, it seems to me, is that in the heat of the moment (as it were) everyone forgets what they’re supposed to do. Calm and collected action is a harder thing to arrange than an evacuation plan on a bit of paper.