Sunday 15 April 2012

'Firefighters were not stopped from entering the water due to health and safety protocols'

On Friday, the Mail was so excited about what it claimed was the latest 'elf 'n' safety' fiasco, it put the story on the front page:

The article by Eleanor Harding and Mark Duell states:

It looked like a major emergency – 25 firemen standing at the water’s edge assessing the life-threatening situation before them.

Stranded 200ft out and struggling for survival was the victim they had come to rescue...a seagull.

And if that scenario were not ludicrous enough, there was worse to come.

The firemen were then barred from going into the 3ft-deep water because it was judged to be a health and safety risk.

As crews from five fire engines stood beside the pond in South London for up to an hour, it fell to a member of the public to pull on his waders and rescue the bird, which was caught up in a plastic bag.

It was accompanied by an editorial (which included the curious phrase 'the legendary Mr Littlejohn') and was followed by comment pieces by Dominique Jackson and Mr Littlejohn. All refer to a health and safety risk assessment that stopped the firemen from rescuing the bird.

However, the London Fire Brigade's statement on the incident puts it slightly differently:

The Brigade was called to the scene by the RSPCA as an emergency and the Brigade always takes calls from such organisations seriously. Firefighters arrived on the scene at 1407 and the incident was declared over at 1411.

A London Fire Brigade spokesperson said:

“The RSPCA called us out as an emergency. Our firefighters rushed to the scene only to realise they’d been called out to a seagull with a plastic bag round its leg which was swimming around quite happily and wasn’t in any distress. This clearly wasn’t an emergency so the firefighters left it to a local animal rescue charity to deal with and swiftly left the scene.

“Often, by the time our firefighters arrive at an incident, someone has waded in to try and rescue an animal only to get into danger themselves, so we send enough crews to deal with whatever we may find. The safety of the public and our firefighters is always our priority.”

Firefighters were not stopped from entering the water due to health and safety protocols. Just this week, LFB crews were called to rescue a man after the bulldozer he was driving fell 40 feet down into a quarry pit. When they realised the man’s life was at risk, the firefighters acted outside of normal procedures and risked their own personal safety to lift him out and save his life. London Fire Brigade’s firefighter are trained to make difficult judgement calls about when it is right to risk their lives in order to save another. 

The Mail has not published this statement.

The Mail also contacted the HSE's Mythbusters Challenge Panel on Thursday, and then wrote a critical, mocking article when they didn't get an immediate response - presumably, a response to the version of the incident as told to them by the Mail:

The Daily Mail contacted the panel at 3pm. But despite being given a whole afternoon to mull it over and it being only the fifth inquiry since the panel’s launch a day before, it failed to give an answer.

It's open to question whether contacting someone at 3pm really gives them 'a whole afternoon' to reply. But perhaps the Panel wanted to do a bit more fact-checking before giving a knee-jerk reaction? In fact, the Panel issued a statement on Friday - the day the Mail's front page article appeared. It said:

"We have now had chance to examine the facts in this case and it is clear that it was not about health and safety at all. The fire service itself has made clear that their decisions at Carshalton were not based on health and safety factors. We endorse this view.

"The Myth Buster Challenge Panel has been set up to bring common sense back to decisions made in the name of health and safety, and to do our job properly we need to establish the facts. We will try our best to meet deadlines when we can but not at the expense of working on hearsay rather than facts. We said that we aim to make a response within 48 hours and it has taken us less than 24 hours to respond to this case."

Despite the hurry to get the Panel's view, and the huffy response when they didn't get it within a few hours, the Mail has not yet informed its readers of this statement.

A statement which has, at time of writing, been in the public domain for two days.

18 comments:

  1. This is the type of situation the Leveson Inquiry should be looking into. A wholly misleading article that smears the name of the London Fire Service just to produce a sensationalist story. Where are the sanctions or the consequences for such things? There doesn't seem to be any.

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  2. @Big Bopper - lucky we have a strong PCC with a robust complaints and corrections process for circumstances like this.




    Oh.

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  3. As soon as I saw the headline I knew the whole story would pretty much amount to lies.

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  4. I see Rod Liddel in yesterday's Sunday Times regurgitated this "story" without checking any facts.

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  5. I switched on the BBC Breakfast News briefly when they were holding up the front pages of the day's newspaper editions. As SilverSurfer says I knew the headline and story would be pretty much a total misrepresentation of the facts. But it gets even worse when it's exposed to hundreds of thousands of viewers who are likely to take it at face value.

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  6. Totally depressing - this story is now out there, whereas the rebuttal is not. It was on This Morning as well - they tweeted about it and that was retweeted to hundreds of other people...years from now the GBP will still mention the seagull and 'elf'n'safety in comments page up and down the land...

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  7. The article about the HSE response (despite only being a couple of days old) says "We are no longer accepting comments on this article." They can dish it out but they...etc. ad nauseum...

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  8. This is the biggest problem facing the newspaper/magazine industry: if their articles aren't based on press releases, they're based on non-stories or half-truths. Or in this case, total fabrications.

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  9. And yet, "Tabloid-watch" fails to question why the Fire Brigade turned up at all. Didn't the RSPCA inform them the 'incident' involved a solitary seagull, or didn't management bother to ask?

    The RSPCA appears to be able to run rings around the Firemen, just as much as it can with the police.

    Looking at your blog archive, on the right, perhaps someone should question this site's motives. After all, you don't believe the Left's agenda isn't all over their press, do you - inaccuracy and all?

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    1. Is that it? That has to be the lamest attempt at justification I've ever read.

      To remind you....the "story" wasn't about the fire brigade "turning up". It's no good trying to move the goalposts now.

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    2. Your use of italics makes you read very angry. Why, in the name of all that is fuzzy, would the RSPCA maliciously, or in any other sense knowingly, waste the time of the emergency services? There is no immediate benefit to them, and each wholly pointless call, by any person or body, diminishes their case the next time they have a genuine concern that needs to be addressed.

      The 'Left' is usually discussed, in blogs which I understand to position themselves as right-wing, in terms of content in the Guardian/Observer. Mr. MacGuffin, and others on his blogroll and Twitter, do cover such inaccurate stories on that end, but for aught I can see they're less prominent because they're more frequently inaccurate churn, and involve less in the way of either harmfully inaccurate reporting (Mr. Burzynski aside), or outright lies expressed in a deliberately provocative way.

      If the RSPCA had nobody on the scene (ref "a local animal charity") then it's quite possible that they were merely relaying a report from a member of the public, who may have perceived a higher risk to the bird than was in fact the case... and it is stated that there is a chance of members of the public putting themselves at risk while trying to intervene, and rescuing someone who made such a misjudgement would certainly be within the remit of the emergency services, albeit with an ultimate cause which you may choose to question.

      I'm a little bemused that you're calling out the blogger here - who, without providing their RL name, does at least use a consistent ID - for their motives, while raising a political agenda of your own, in an anonymous post. Your post is not specified in response to anyone, and so is presumably directed in response to the entry, rather than the comments... and there is no reference to right- or left-wing politics in the entry, merely a case of wildly inaccurate reporting, by a newspaper with a terrible record for accuracy, which, at best, belittles the efforts of a group of people who regularly risk their lives to help the people of London. This deserves criticism regardless of where it comes from.

      J.
      ---

      P.S. As you'll most likely call me on it too, I'm using 'anonymous' because I am currently skipping out on a voluntary, massively oversubscribed review class. It's not a good reason, but it is the fullest disclosure I'll give.

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  10. There's reason for all this. There is a government agenda to deregulate and reduce the "burdens" on business, and health and safety is very much in their sights. The distorted stories about benefit fraud are performing much the same function for the cutting of benefits. It's all quite evil actually.

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  11. Looking at your blog archive, on the right, perhaps someone should question this site's motives. After all, you don't believe the Left's agenda isn't all over their press, do you - inaccuracy and all?

    Utter bollocks. On the blog archive on the right, I can see a section for The Guardian and The Independent, replete with criticism. The reason why right-wing newspapers feature prominently on this blog - which you have either not studied closely or are unable to understand - is that they are the ones most likely to print inaccuracies, distortions and lies.

    There's reason for all this. There is a government agenda to deregulate and reduce the "burdens" on business, and health and safety is very much in their sights. The distorted stories about benefit fraud are performing much the same function for the cutting of benefits. It's all quite evil actually.

    Absolutely, completely, hat-tippingly, 100% spot on, Mr. Richards. I would add the EU, the Human Rights Act, Palestine, Hillsborough and climate change off the top of my head as examples where the lies printed in newspapers are to soften the readers up to the wishes, fancies and agendas of politicians, editors and big business.

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  12. Anonymous, try reading the LFB's statement again. It states clearly why they turned up.

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  13. ""Tabloid-watch" fails to question why the Fire Brigade turned up at all."

    Not very good at reading are you, Ms.Anonymous?

    It was a 999 call. Are you suggesting that LFB delay responding to an emergency until management has assessed the validity of the call?

    I'm sure your employers (Daily Mail?) would have a front page field day with that policy.

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  14. Mail = gits. (Not as verbose as some, but definitely concise.)

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  15. The Mail could of course atone with a feature on people killed and injured at work in time for Workers' Memorial Day on 28th April.

    It's ok...I'm laughing even as I write this....

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  16. Telegraph still repeating it as "fact" today

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