00:00Good afternoon. Before I start with the incident update, I'd just like to once again express our gratitude and acknowledgements for the number of people which have worked with us throughout this incident.
00:10My sincere thanks once again to all our staff which have worked tirelessly throughout the entire incident, which includes all of our support staff who have supplied water, food up to the incident, the mechanics which have been on site helping and maintaining all the appliances.
00:23Once again, it's been a truly enormous effort by North Yutch Farm Rescue Service staff.
00:26And thanks once again to our partner agencies, our farmers, the gamekeepers, the contractors, Ministry of Defence, importantly the local resilience forum who have played a massive part in helping move the incident along from the command structures and Galtree's Lodge Park who have been the host for the strategic holding area allowing the national assets to be hosted whilst they were in our county.
00:47And once again, most importantly to our local communities, your support has been fantastic all the way through and I know on behalf of our crews that that has made a massive difference to us whilst we've been dealing with this incident.
00:57The incident status. Now the fire remains contained. It's been contained now for more than eight days.
01:03We have continued to monitor the site and we are dealing with sporadic flare-ups and once again a flare-up is where the peat and the burning underneath the peat comes up to the surface, finds something combustible like the dry grass and we have a minor flare-up.
01:16All of those have been dealt with through normal firefighting measures and will continue to do so and this will go on for some considerable time.
01:23The fact that the fire has now been contained for eight days gives us the confidence that things have moved in the significantly right direction and allows us then to consider the resources that we currently have on site.
01:33Last night we had around eight appliances at various times in the incident and this will continue to be monitored.
01:39Today we've upped the number of appliances there while the crews undertake very specific work alongside some of the other contractors as a fire mitigation to stop and prevent future fire spread.
01:49We do have some farmers and contractors which remain on site and they are once again working alongside fire crews.
01:56So yesterday we reached an important milestone which is where we can move to recovery.
02:00Now what does that mean?
02:01This means that over 30 strategic leaders agreed yesterday in a strategic command group that the dynamic phase of the incident from a multi-agent response can be stood down.
02:10All organisations apart from fire will now stand down their major incident status and they will transition into recovery and to business as usual.
02:21Fire will remain at a major incident status as a single agency and we will maintain this into next week until another strategic review is undertaken.
02:29In conjunction with our operational crews and the tactical commanders who are on scene and managing the incident on a day-to-day basis.
02:36The recovery will still continue to be led by the local resilience forum and the recovery group will be chaired by North Yorkshire Council.
02:43Now there will be a number of key cells underneath there which will help the services, the agencies and communities move back to a new normality.
02:51This will include infrastructure, cells which will deal with the roadways and the recovery from transport, the environment, economic recovery and also health as continuous health monitoring will continue for some time.
03:05This further leads us into the response from the National Resilience Assets.
03:09Now our National Resilience Assets were called for two key vital areas.
03:13Firstly, it was to give our crews a welfare break so that the National Resilience crews would then work on scene alongside North Yorkshire Farm Rescue Service crews but allow us to return some of the crews home, particularly the on-call firefighters who have other primary employment.
03:27It was also so that we could return business as usual back into the county at a better scale so that we maintain the appropriate response throughout the county.
03:35Now from our perspective and from the strategic group's perspective, those have been achieved.
03:40We only request National Resilience Assets for a very finite period and what we've done and what we were required to undertake has been achieved.
03:49So there was agreement reached again once again yesterday for all the National Assets to return to their home counties.
03:56This will commence starting from today and will go right through till tomorrow morning when the strategic holding area will begin to pack up as all the assets begin to return.
04:05It's vital now that I recognise the extreme support and work that we've had from a large number of supporting counties.
04:12These include Hertfordshire, Staffordshire, West Yorkshire, Manchester, Tyne and Weir, London, Cleveland, Humberside, Cumbria, South Wales, Gloucestershire and Hereford and Worcestershire.
04:26Now these services have supported us with appliances, with crews and also with specialist advisors at the scene, which has allowed again North Yorkshire's assets to stand down and have a respite period, which has worked extremely well.
04:39And I thank them for that support and helping us achieve what we needed to do.
04:43Whilst the National Assets are returning, they remain available for recall should North Yorkshire require them.
04:48What's the next steps? So the next steps for North Yorkshire are remaining in a major incident status while we transition the service as a single service back into a business as usual work routine.
04:59Which means that we will still have North Yorkshire family rescue service staff at the Langdale incident.
05:04We will still have a number of appliances through the day and at night monitoring and controlling that perimeter.
05:09But we can start to now come to recovery in our own service, allowing crews to return and only responders required.
05:15But I can state, and we have now the absolute confidence, we have done everything we can to resolve this incident in the fastest possible time.
05:23And our attention now turns to recovery and investigation.
05:26We have now, as officers return from the scene to their daily duties, stood up a fire investigation cell.
05:32We will undertake a detailed investigation of what they believe, if possible, the cause of the fire was.
05:37Now this will take them time, because they have to interview a large number of people, and obviously review a large number of data sets, and also a large area that's been on fire.
05:47I ask the public and other agencies to give us the time to be undertaken, and for them to arrive reports to come out in due course.
