Four firefighters treated for exhaustion after tackling heatwave blazes

Homes in Maltby near Rotherham were damaged in a fire

Four firefighters have been treated for heat exhaustion after tackling blazes caused by the heatwave.

Homes and buildings were damaged by fires on Tuesday across Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, including in Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Boston.

South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue (SYFR) said it had received more than 2,100 calls and responded to 228 incidents during a "testing" 48 hours.

The fire service said that all four firefighters made a "full recovery".

Two of them were treated in hospital, it said.

It comes as the UK experienced record high temperatures, with Met Office figures showing Coningsby in Lincolnshire reaching 40.3C on Tuesday - the highest UK temperature ever recorded.

Paul Heffernan, from SYFR, said: "For a few hours there yesterday and the day before the call volume was extremely high."

A major incident declared by emergency services in South Yorkshire, North Yorkshire, the Humber region and Lincolnshire on Tuesday has since been stood down, though fire services warned that "conditions remain extremely dry and the risk of fire is still very high".

Six houses were destroyed in Woodland Drive, Barnsley when a fire broke out in a back garden and swept through nearby properties.

Carl Fox, said his house was only spared when he came home from work to find "some lads in the garden fighting the fire with a hose pipe".

"It started next to the fence with a shed and it all just went up," he said.

"If the guys had not lifted that fence panel out to use the hose pipes in the garden - that probably gave us another five or 10 minutes otherwise the whole house would have been up.

"It would have just carried on going - our house would have taken up and next door too."

An online appeal for families who have lost their homes in the fire has already raised more than £16,000.

Doncaster Council said a major blaze in Clayton, on Tuesday, spread to three residential properties, while a number of houses caught fire in the Kiveton Park and Maltby areas of Rotherham.

Fire engines were called to a street in Maltby, Rotherham, with no reported injuries

In Maltby, firefighters rescued a dog from one of the houses.

In a Twitter post, the fire service described the dog's survival as "a miraculous story".

"A Staffordshire Bull terrier called Dickie was inside one of the properties affected by the fire for more than four hours, before being reunited with its owner by firefighters," they tweeted.

A fire on railway sidings near Sprotbrough Road in Doncaster caused damage to a number of homes and gardens.

Dave Cooper, who was evacuated from his home, said everybody in the street was safe.

"There are some personal things that we've lost that were sentimental to us, this was my parents' house," he said.

"But possessions, they can be replaced."

Firefighters said they also dealt with many less serious fires on fields throughout South Yorkshire, with many of these blazes leaving large plumes of smoke stretching across roads and villages.

Crews from Derbyshire and West Yorkshire were called in to help..

The fire near Sprotbrough Road in Doncaster caused large plumes of smoke to drift over the city

In Thirsk, North Yorkshire, farmers helped douse a large field fire with hosepipes. A nearby bird of prey centre said it was "about five minutes away from evacuating" as the fire ripped though the field.

North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service said it received 172 emergency calls on Tuesday and responded to 57 of them adding "six of these incidents required more than four appliances. Our largest incident required nine appliances".

In Lincolnshire, a fire in a four-storey apartment block in Boston, forced families out of their homes overnight. Elsewhere in the county eight fire crews put out field fires at Gayton le Marsh, near Alford.

Humberside firefighters fought a blaze in Asselby near Goole which was thought to have been started by electric cables in trees.

Rail services are struggling to return to normal, with damage to the East Coast Main Line in Bedford halting services to and from London until repairs are carried out.

Meanwhile, Northern Powergrid said the majority of customers had been reconnected after nearly 8,000 properties in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and the North East were left without electricity due to heat-affected power lines.

The company said: "As the temperatures are dropping and we are seeing less disruption, we expect to reconnect the last few customers early this afternoon."