Aug 27, 2026 · 48 min · 14 segments
The UK’s 2026 wildfire season has pushed Fire and Rescue Services into unprecedented operational territory. In this episode, we look at the numbers behind more than a thousand significant wildfires…
Pete WakefieldHost
Hey everyone, and welcome back to the FireFights podcast where we seek to develop, inspire, and motivate the world of the emergency services operator through a series of wide-ranging conversations.
Now before we go any further, just hit that rate, follow, or subscribe button on whatever platform you're listening to.
Now here's what I've got for you today.2026 has been the busiest wildfire season that the UK Fire and Rescue Service has ever recorded.
Not necessarily the worst in terms of the headlines, but definitely the busiest in terms of operational demand.
I've been going through stuff for the past two weeks looking across a lot of national data, looking at service reports, looking at the news, looking inside the NFCC, looking at some PPE standards.
I'm gonna attempt the impossible because I think it's super relevant and I think I learned a lot during this sort of culmination and putting together all this debrief.
I'm gonna talk about what happens when the Fire and Rescue Service are asked to do more, especially when it comes to things like more wildfires than they've ever been asked to do before, and whether our crewing, our staffing, the size of our services, the kit, the training, the national systems that are built for structural firefighting are actually the right tools for the job.
Double-checked a lot of the numbers, things that I can trust, and there's a few caveats that'll be in there as well.
Which incidents put the biggest strain on crews? Not necessarily the biggest fires on the map, but the ones that ate into our resources.
Maybe we spent the most hours there, used the most people, used the most firefighters.
And whether wildfire activity has started to eat into our normal emergency response, our normal emergency cover, and whether it stopped being just a big job and started becoming a resilience problem, especially a national resilience problem.
And we're also, on that note, gonna talk about how national mutual aid actually works when, for example, there's nineteen incidents all running at once.
Then I'm also gonna delve into whether or not we think we are protecting our people, our firefighters properly while we're asked to do all of this stuff.
We're talking PPE, heat stress, smoke, stuff that doesn't necessarily make it into the news, although it has in the recent weeks, but definitely decides whether someone like us, firefighters on the trucks, get to go home at the end of the shift after fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen-hour shifts all the national deployments have been on, or whether they end up in a hospital with heat stress.
And then I'm gonna attempt to finish with a little bit of history, how we got here, um, have a look at other countries, what they do differently, and whether any of it can actually translate into UK firefighting given our terrain, given the different fuel types, and given the training that the firefighters are given here.
Important note, it's not a claim that the UK Fire and Rescue Service are failing.
But a lot of what's gonna follow will hopefully show some real strengths and some real improvements that we've done, and also some of it's gonna show some gaps.
I've tried to treat both with the same level of evidence without sensationalizing anything.
Think it's important, think it's relevant, think it's timely, so let's get into it.So firstly, what is actually classed as a wildfire? Now, not every grass or field fire is a wildfire.
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Hey everyone, and welcome back to the FireFights podcast where we seek to develop, inspire, and motivate the world of the emergency services operator through a series of wide-ranging conversations.
Now before we go any further, just hit that rate, follow, or subscribe button on whatever platform you're listening to.
Now here's what I've got for you today.2026 has been the busiest wildfire season that the UK Fire and Rescue Service has ever recorded.
Not necessarily the worst in terms of the headlines, but definitely the busiest in terms of operational demand.
I've been going through stuff for the past two weeks looking across a lot of national data, looking at service reports, looking at the news, looking inside the NFCC, looking at some PPE standards.
I'm gonna attempt the impossible because I think it's super relevant and I think I learned a lot during this sort of culmination and putting together all this debrief.
I'm gonna talk about what happens when the Fire and Rescue Service are asked to do more, especially when it comes to things like more wildfires than they've ever been asked to do before, and whether our crewing, our staffing, the size of our services, the kit, the training, the national systems that are built for structural firefighting are actually the right tools for the job.
Double-checked a lot of the numbers, things that I can trust, and there's a few caveats that'll be in there as well.
Which incidents put the biggest strain on crews? Not necessarily the biggest fires on the map, but the ones that ate into our resources.
Maybe we spent the most hours there, used the most people, used the most firefighters.
And whether wildfire activity has started to eat into our normal emergency response, our normal emergency cover, and whether it stopped being just a big job and started becoming a resilience problem, especially a national resilience problem.
And we're also, on that note, gonna talk about how national mutual aid actually works when, for example, there's nineteen incidents all running at once.
Then I'm also gonna delve into whether or not we think we are protecting our people, our firefighters properly while we're asked to do all of this stuff.
We're talking PPE, heat stress, smoke, stuff that doesn't necessarily make it into the news, although it has in the recent weeks, but definitely decides whether someone like us, firefighters on the trucks, get to go home at the end of the shift after fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen-hour shifts all the national deployments have been on, or whether they end up in a hospital with heat stress.
And then I'm gonna attempt to finish with a little bit of history, how we got here, um, have a look at other countries, what they do differently, and whether any of it can actually translate into UK firefighting given our terrain, given the different fuel types, and given the training that the firefighters are given here.
Important note, it's not a claim that the UK Fire and Rescue Service are failing.
But a lot of what's gonna follow will hopefully show some real strengths and some real improvements that we've done, and also some of it's gonna show some gaps.
I've tried to treat both with the same level of evidence without sensationalizing anything.
Think it's important, think it's relevant, think it's timely, so let's get into it.So firstly, what is actually classed as a wildfire? Now, not every grass or field fire is a wildfire.