Stourbridge Blaze Raises Questions Over Whether It Was Preventable

Only days earlier, Paul McVeigh had been stretched out on a deckchair in the garden of his Stourbridge home, looking up at the night sky in the hope of catching sight of the solar eclipse.

That same chair is now a scorched skeleton on his lawn, standing over the one small patch of grass that escaped the wildfire’s blackened trail.

By 1.30pm on Thursday, the 57-year-old retired telecoms engineer was watching in disbelief as a huge wall of flames tore across the golf course behind his property and headed straight for his home.

The fire ripped through this affluent part of the West Midlands within minutes, destroying 19 properties and burning more than 500 acres of land, although Mr McVeigh’s large family house on Melrose Avenue was, fortunately, left standing.

Driven by grass that had turned straw-dry and woodland left tinder-like in the year’s hottest conditions, with temperatures climbing to 38C, the blaze is believed to have begun in a nearby farmer’s field.

From there, the flames pushed east across Ounty John Lane, where homes were consumed, while another front raced north from the field, swept over the historic Stourbridge Golf Club and reached the gardens of properties on Melrose Avenue.

A relative of the landowner at the site where the fire is understood to have started has also claimed they believe it was deliberately lit in three separate locations.

Emergency services were inundated with thousands of 999 calls, with paramedics treating 68 people and taking 25 to hospital, among them a child and six firefighters. Dozens of residents were also forced to abandon their homes.

Firefighting efforts continued on Friday as pockets of Stourbridge Golf Course were still smouldering, emitting noxious smoke. Alarmingly, the fire service predicts the operation could run on for weeks to ensure the ground is properly dampened to prevent a recurrence.

‘The flames were way above the house,’ Mr McVeigh told Our News Outlet. ‘It was like an apocalypse movie. But I think we have been incredibly lucky.’

For the other side of the golf course is a scene of devastation. Fire crews were unable to stop the blaze from sweeping across the farmers’ fields, allowing the fire to gut several large homes on Ounty John Lane.

Now all that remains are the jagged structures of those luxury properties, which sell for up to £1.4million, and the charred bodies of flash cars, including Ferraris to BMWs.

Across the road, the fire was fed by flames once it reached the trees on the edge of the golf course, allowing them to leap higher than each house backing on to it.

Several Melrose Avenue residents told Our News Outlet that these trees have been a source of longstanding tension with the golf club and they have complained on several occasions about them not being cut back.

Standing on his lawn on Friday morning, its grass turned to ash, Mr McVeigh described how he ventured out to the golf course after seeing smoke on Thursday afternoon.

‘It had come halfway across the golf course in an hour,’ he said. ‘As I went back, there was quite a large copse on my right-hand side that had caught fire and you could see a deer running towards our fence line.

‘It was like somebody had poured flammable liquid onto the floor. It was going in every direction, like the speed of a slow walk. What was brown was becoming black and a ring of fire was creeping all the way up.’

Police advised Mr McVeigh, pictured, to evacuate and he fled with his family at about 3.30pm. He led me to the fence line where the back of his shed has been reduced to charred splinters. We looked through the gap, where the fence once was, on to the golf course. The ground was sludgy due to the vast amounts of water sprayed on it by fire crews.

Thick strips of burnt grass scarred the rest of the course and smoke continued rising ominously from a nearby thicket of woodland.

A firefighter continued to douse the ground nearby. On the horizon, most of the fields on the surrounding hills were mere soot.

Mr McVeigh’s neighbour, 65-year-old retiree Stella Layton, told Our News Outlet: ‘I thought we’d lost the house. You could see the flames coming over the top of the building. We just ran’.

She pointed to the black husk that was once her fence: ‘It just stopped right on the border and took the fence. You could hear the roar and the crackle of it – then you could hear the explosions from the houses,’ she added.

‘People said that it was fireworks, I said, “That’s not fireworks”.’

Ms Layton rushed out to douse her garden with water when she first saw a plume of smoke above the golf course. This moment of quick-thinking seems to have spared her property from serious damage.

After police advised her and her husband Mick to leave they jumped into the car with their two dogs and retreated to a local pub ‘When we walked out the door, I didn’t think we’d come back to our house,’ she says.

Ms Layton says that she had even remarked a couple of months ago to Mick that they ‘could be in trouble’ if wildfires ever reached them.

‘You can see the ground is as dry as tinder,’ she explained. On the edge of the affluent street, police were expanding their cordon, warning residents that if they left, they would not be allowed back for some time.

‘A lot of residents are feeling quite upset,’ said gas engineer Paul Crane. ‘Even though it’s a conservation area, the trees on the golf course are on residents’ land. And there’s no management of them.

‘The golf club don’t want to take any responsibility. Somebody has to be accountable.

‘The problem is in this woodland, there’s so much grass and branches and dead matter, it’s just an accident waiting to happen.’

Stourbridge Golf Club said in a statement: ‘We always take requests from our neighbours seriously, investigating and making assessment following any communication we receive.’

Several farmers were also involved in the effort to try to halt the inferno, with footage obtained by Our News Outlet showing them driving their tractors close to the advancing flames to try to create a firebreak by spraying the earth with water. Their heroic efforts were not enough – by this stage the blaze was simply too intense.

Farmer Brian Pardoe, 69, said it had started on his cousin’s land. It was the second fire in a matter of weeks, he added.

‘That was actually a spark off the combine,’ he said of the previous fire. ‘This one seems a bit more deliberate, doesn’t it?’

‘It was started in three places. It was burning in three different places at one stage, so an accident looks unlikely to me.’

Indeed, yesterday West Midlands Fire Service did not rule out the possibility that A-level pupils celebrating their results might have been responsible. But a spokesman for the West Midlands Fire Service added: ‘At this early stage, we would not want to blame young people or any particular groups of people’.

Back at Iverly Park Farm, Mr Pardoe told me how he immediately leapt into action when he heard of the fire, with his son, Daniel, among those driving tractors to battle the flames.

As fires continue spreading across Britain questions remain over whether nature – such as those trees on the golf club –should be left to itself.

Try telling that to the residents who lost their homes in Stourbridge.