BRIGG FIRE STATION GIVES TOP TIPS ON STAYING SAFE & GETS US LOOKING BACK IN TIME

Brigg Fire Station is giving local people helpful advice on home safety via social media.
In a very recent post it listed some 'top tips' including closing all internal doors at night to help stop fire from spreading.
This alert was accompanied by pictures of a shut door "from a fire that was thankfully contained to the kitchen before our crews arrived."
There was also reference to employing 'fireguards' - relevant for households which still have coal and wood-burning grates.
Brigg Fire Station's community-related post reminded us of a childhood incident from the mid-1960s when our family's council house in Brigg suffered a soot-related blaze in its kitchen chimney.
A Brigg crew, then based in the original Lindsey County Council station on Wrawby Road opposite the courthouse and police station, was soon on the scene and used a hose to tackle the fire. We all got out safely and only water and soot damage resulted.
This type of fire was then very common as (pre-central heating) coal fires heated a 'back boiler' behind brickwork to provide hot water all year round, as well as warming domestic properties during the colder months.
When we joined the Brigg staff of the Lincolnshire & South Humberside Times weekly newspaper in January 1980, one important task at our Wrawby Street office was to make periodic 'fire calls' - phoning Humberside Fire Service's headquarters for details of any local call-outs.
Such calls were being made hourly by reporting staff when we joined the Scunthorpe Evening Telegraph in January 1984, and that included evenings and weekends.
Some years later, new technology was introduced and resulted in the fire service sending fax messages to the Telegraph whenever it had deployed crews to local fires and road accidents.
These very informative faxes included the location, the station dealing with incident (including Brigg, Barton and Kirton Lindsey) and the number of pumps in attendance.
The growth of the internet eventually saw Humberside Fire & Rescue Service posting details of 'Live Incidents' online.
These can be accessed by interested members of the general public but are of particular interest to the media.
The website was recently re-designed to give it a new and improved look, and the types of blazes are categorised.
Here's a link to the entries, which are given in date order (with the most recent always appearing at the top).
While working for the Lincs Times we used to stand in for a reporter who covered and lived in the Barton area if she was on holiday.
This involved driving north to our neighbouring town, parking the company car and then calling at various addresses on a list to see people who might have newsworthy items.
Dropping in at Barton Fire Station on Holydyke "to see if anything has happened" was on this list.
We hoped to find the sub-officer or a leading fire-fighter in the office to have a word.
This traditional reporting method - talking to people face to face - sometimes produced newsworthy items of general interest that would never have made it to a modern online 'fire log'.
However, the current method must save a great deal of officer time because, decades ago, the vast majority of telephone calls to fire service 'control' by many media outlets produced nothing at all of local interest.
Young reporters dreaded missing something important which later appeared on the front page of a rival newspaper!
If anything 'big' resulted from fire calls, a reporter and a photographer would be sent to the scene.
Scunthorpe's three steelworks were an exception, as media representatives were not admitted to these sites and its private internal road network without invitation. Normanby Park works and much of Redbourn had closed by the early 1980s, leaving Appleby-Frodingham and the then new Anchor site, off Brigg Road.
The British Steel Corporation had its own Scunthorpe fire service. One of its chiefs, years ago, was Brigg's John Chudley, who also served at the town's retained station. He may well have been in the crew which tackled our domestic blaze.
A look through Brigg Blog's picture archive has produced an interesting one from that decade. Seen above (top right) it shows proud members of Brigg Fire Station who won an award for having the best-kept appliance in the Lindsey area of Lincolnshire. We think John Chudley is on the right of the group.
The town's original fire station (closed in the 1970s) was eventually converted to retail use and part of it, fronting Wrawby Street, is now occupied by Blyton Ice Cream.
The Humberside Fire & Rescue Service currently has full-time and part-time firefighter vacancies. View details here...