Electrical fire destroys garage on residential Wigan street

Crews from Wigan and Hindley were called to Hornby Street, Swinley, around 7pm yesterday, Wednesday March 24, to reports that a garage with a car inside was on fire.

On arrival they were met with the sight of a very large fire coming from a single storey garage which was attached to a house.

Hindley watch manager Mark Anderson said: "It was completely engulfed in fire. The crews quickly made access to the exterior of the building to extinguish it.

"In total, because of the construction of the building, we were there for several hours, extinguishing very deep-seated pockets of fire which we couldn't access. It was an electrical fault, it completely destroyed the garage."

He added: "It's a listed building, we believe. It's 120 years old or so, the building. This made it very difficult to put the fire out, because of the construction - it made it difficult.

"Because of the brickwork, the difficulty is that the fire had dropped between the two skins of brickwork and we had difficulty in getting into that area. We had to use high pressure land equipment which is powerful enough to fire jets of water through brick walls.

"It's not often we're able to do that but the traditional methods weren't working. We ended up spending two hours longer at the job than we had allowed for."

The crews were on the scene for around three hours. They also fitted new smoke detectors in the adjoining property which, fortunately, only suffered minor smoke damage despite being attached to the garage.