Careful parking could save lives!
Warwickshire County Council’s Fire and Rescue Service is issuing a stark safety warning to residents after an appliance struggled to get to an incident due to cars being parked on both sides of a narrow road.
Parking is becoming more and more of an issue in Rugby and this incident just highlights the dangers of that. Parking cars side by side in narrow streets, parking on double yellows and parking inconsiderately will mean that appliances could be stopped from getting through. In some cases crews have had to leave the appliance half way down the street and run hoses to an incident.
Crew Manager Kevin Matthews said: “We understand parking is an issue in some areas, but when cars park side by side and not tight to the kerb we can sometimes have a problem getting an appliance through. This can obviously have serious consequences in an emergency.
“In a recent incident we had to knock on doors to ask people to re-park their cars tighter to the kerb and fold in their mirrors.“
Firefighters regularly carry out visual audits along key routes to ensure emergency vehicles can pass through should they need to without obstruction from people parking to close together on narrow streets or on double yellow lines.
However, smaller streets have always been an issue, so residents need to be mindful of the parking issues in their street to ensure that should an emergency vehicle need to get through that they can.