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Fire-setting is costing Dundee £1.25m a year

Fire crews dealing with a malicious blaze at Baxter Park in April.
Fire crews dealing with a malicious blaze at Baxter Park in April.

Millions of pounds is “going up in flames” because of fire-raising in Dundee, according to a senior fire officer.

It costs the fire service at least £2,000 an hour to attend fires, many of which are started deliberately.

The crime cost the city £1.25 million, assuming an average of at least one hour per incident last year.

This could be much higher taking into account major fires, like the recent one at Strathmartine Hospital, which raged for more than six hours last month.

A total of 623 deliberately set fires tore through the city last year, 82 of which were classed as “primary fires” in houses, buildings, cars or anything with monetary value.

The rest involved outbuildings, wheelie bins, rubbish and grass.

Fire service group manager Martin Tait told Dundee councillors about the scale of the problem when he gave the service’s annual report for the city from April 2014 to March 2015.

The most devastating fires gutted a pair of much-loved buildings in April this year a pavilion at Baxter Park and the former Strathmartine Hospital building.

Each fire is understood to have been deliberately started.

The vandals who set fire to a wheelie bin outside the former bowling green pavilion at Baxter Park set back a £3.5m community project to rejuvenate the area, leaving the Friends of Baxter Park devastated.

Days later, firefighters battled an inferno at the former Strathmartine Hospital to the north of the city.

It had been a major development site and was set for a painstaking conversion, but has been left badly damaged and in danger of demolition.

After hearing the figures, Councillor Richard McCready said: “A million pounds is a ridiculous amount of money to go up in flames.

“The council’s £5,000 for environmental clean-ups is a drop in the ocean, and one of the positives to come out of Monday’s debate was that the chief executive acknowledged that we need to spend more on fire prevention. This really is spending money to save money.”

Mr Tait also said that as well as costing taxpayers money, those who start fires put their own, and other people’s, lives at risk.

He said: “SFRS is appealing in particular to young people to consider the consequences of deliberately setting a fire.

“We would urge parents to ensure that their children know about and understand the potentially tragic consequences deliberate fires can have, as well as the impact for responding emergency services.

“Fire-setting is an offence don’t accept it, report it. Bin and rubbish fires can quickly take hold and spread to buildings and vehicles, posing a major risk to life and property.

“We continue to conduct a lot of work in the local area to reduce the occurrence of deliberate fires.”

More information is available online at www.firescotland.gov.uk.