Already the month of May is proving to be a hectic one for Suffolk’s firefighters.

The unseasonably dry weather – we didn’t even get April showers – has seen an unusually high number of grass / undergrowth fires in these last few days.

Over the weekend the Unimog from Lowestoft has been to two major grassland / heathland fires. The largest of the two was at Thorpeness Golf Club which escalated to Make Pumps 10 as the fire spread across approximately 100 acres of the golf course. The incident was eating up Suffolk’s resources as crews were being relieved by pumps from all over the county.

The Unimog was used through at least three changes of crew which also meant that retained firefighters from Normanshurst were either standing by as a crew or making up numbers with the wholetime Watch.

In the last week we’ve had 10 shouts – almost unheard of these days. And the same can be said of other stations within Suffolk, some getting a month worth of shouts in just a few days.

And, with a far few of these shouts coming in the middle of the night, most of us are hoping for a few quiet nights to catch up on our beauty sleep – and looking at our lot, they need quite a few quiet nights to catch up on their beauty sleep!

– IAN CARTER (www.accessiblewebsites.co.uk)