Four fire crew ‘sent to deaths for no good reason’

Stafford Crown Court heard that the four-man team, all wearing breathing apparatus, died in 2007 after being ordered into the smoke-filled vegetable packing plant, which had already been evacuated.

Opening the Crown’s case against three fire service managers accused of four counts of manslaughter, prosecutor Richard Matthews QC alleged that no one was in danger when crews were sent into the warehouse in Atherstone-on-Stour, Warwickshire, on the evening of November 2 2007.

After explaining to the jury that command of the incident passed between station manager Timothy Woodward and watch managers Paul Simmons and Adrian Ashley, Mr Matthews told the jury: “It’s the prosecution’s case that each of these defendants so badly failed to fulfil their duties to the firefighters under their command that their actions amount to what lawyers call gross negligence.

“It’s the prosecution’s case that the failings of each of the three defendants were a cause of the deaths of those four firefighters.”

Firefighters Ashley Stephens, Darren Yates-Badley, John Averis and Ian Reid, known by the radio call sign Red 1, died “not in a valiant effort to rescue anyone” but having been ordered into a storage compartment containing cardboard boxes, labels and some old furniture, Mr Matthews claimed.

The lawyer told jurors the case was about “the needless loss of four lives, four individuals, lost as a result of having been sent into a situation where no one was in peril... sent into what was and should have been recognised as an obviously dangerous situation for no good reason”.

Further alleging that the blaze had not been properly assessed by those in command, Mr Matthews added: “What should have been apparent was that sending firefighters into that situation equipped in the way you will hear they were – with the inadequate resources that were to hand – was unnecessarily dangerous.”

Simmons, 51, from Hampton Magna, Warwickshire, Ashley, 45, from Nuneaton, and Woodward, 50, from Leamington Spa, each deny four separate counts of manslaughter.

All the charges against the defendants allege that they unlawfully killed the men who died “by gross negligence” while acting as incident commanders.

The indictment further alleges that Simmons and Ashley breached their duty of care to those who were killed by “exposing them to substantial risk to life when no other lives were at risk”.

Woodward is alleged to have breached his duty of care to the deceased by failing to end the deployment of colleagues wearing breathing apparatus for the purpose of “offensive” firefighting.

Mr Matthews took the jury of six men and six women through details of an Incident Command Support Pack carried on all fire appliances in Warwickshire.

The document, which requires incident commanders to review their tactical mode of firefighting every 20 minutes, highlighted the central role of dynamic risk assessments by those in charge, the prosecutor said.

The barrister went on: “This is where all three defendants failed and failed very badly. Firefighters were sent into that smoke-filled storage area without any or enough thought as to what they were facing, what they had in place to tackle those dangers and how equipped they were to tackle those dangers.”

The trial continues.