West Midlands fire services saw big rise in summer wildfires

One of the fires in 2022 involved bales of hay near the Grade II listed Rowton Castle in Shropshire

The number of summer wildfires which Shropshire firefighters had to tackle nearly trebled in 2022.

The county's fire service responded to 138 calls in June, July and August, compared to 50 in 2021 and 40 in 2020.

It took 53 of those calls in July 2022, when the UK was experiencing record temperatures, but the peak came in August when it responded to 65 wildfire calls.

Other counties also recorded big increases in the number of calls.

Herefordshire and Worcestershire saw wildfire related calls treble and Warwickshire firefighters responded to six times the number of calls in 2022, compared to the previous year.

The information was supplied to the Press Association in response to a Freedom of Information request to England's 44 fire services.

It asked for the number of call outs to wildfires in the summers of 2020, 2021 and 2022.

Fire services across the whole of England dealt with nearly 25,000 wildfires in the summer of 2022, almost four times that recorded over the same period in 2021.