London fire: Midland councils meet fire chiefs for safety talks after Grenfell Tower blaze - WATCH
Council bosses were today meeting West Midlands Fire Service chiefs to discuss safety in the wake of the Grenfell Tower blaze which killed at least 17 people.
The service will host representatives from all seven of the local authorities in the West Midlands at its Birmingham headquarters to review and discuss the current arrangements in place in response to the incident.
But the service insists it has 'robust arrangements' in place should the incident arise locally, and has offered its support to high-rise flat residents.
Chief fire officer, Phil Loach, said there are 'no significant known issues' with tower blocks in the Midlands, of which there are around 400.
WATCH the chief fire officer give his reassurances over high-rise block safety
He said: "We have taken the action of instigating a meeting where we have invited representatives from all the councils across the West Midlands to take stock of where we are in our arrangements, to ensure we are able to respond to any immediate outcomes from the Grenfell Tower incident in London.
"We want to ensure we have maintained the structures that allow us to take in any of the medium and long term actions that I think we can all reasonably predict will be an outcome of this event.
"If there are specific lessons learned to come out of this incident as we consistently and constantly do with other incidents, we will take them on board and train for them to make sure we maintain that status of being the best that we can be.
"We have a really effective emergency response which we hope never to use but it is there and we are confident our attendance standards and our ability to fight the fires is amongst the best in the country. "
London Fire Brigade said more than 200 firefighters and 40 fire engines attended the scene after the blaze ripped through the 24-storey block in west London in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
But there are still "unknown numbers" of bodies in Grenfell Tower following the devastating inferno, London Fire Commissioner Dany Cotton has said.
Over the last five years, there have been around 260 injuries and five fire deaths in medium to high rise buildings across the West Midlands.
Mr Loach added that fire prevention is 'absolutely critical' in this situation.
"Fire prevention has served us well now for 10 years or more with a significant reduction in fire related incidents.
"Prevention is key and that is the relationship between the fire service and the community. I want the community to be assured that we also place significant and fundamental importance on being ready to respond to respond to emergency incidents in that risk based five minutes attendance standard.
"So should prevention protection fail, we are in the best position to do something about that.
"We will seek to support residents through our safe and well process which assists them and supports them in making an assessment of the safety in the place where they live.
"To ensure people have working smoke alarms, to ensure there is an escape plan and a night-time routine. Most importantly this is a very important and tragic but uncommon event and people are generally safe across the region."
In order to combat high rise fires, the service has a six-storey high rise training facility at its Oldbury Fire Station base.
It allows firefighters to simulate the events at various heights.
Mr Loach added: "It is an investment by WMFS to make sure our firefighters are well prepared. The challenges are the thermal loading of the fire - primarily driven by wind and the affects of wind on the development.
"The training facilities we have can similuate those scenarios at different heights and our firefighters have the opportunity and the requirement to train for these type of incidents.
"There are no fires [in the West Midlands] that have been nothing like the scale you have seen [in London]. I think going back some considerable years, Merry Hill Court in Smethwick could have been the closest to it."
