36 Buses Destroyed at a Chadwell St Mary Storage Yard: The Lessons
One deliberate fire in Essex destroyed roughly 36 buses in a night, against nine deliberate bus and coach fires recorded nationally in a whole year. What the evidence actually says about vehicles catching each other alight, and what a responsible person can do about an open yard.
INFIRISK Team·11 min read·
David Hillas, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
In the year ending March 2026, fire and rescue services in England attended nine deliberate bus or coach fires. Nine, across the whole country, across twelve months.
On the evening of 5 June 2026, a single deliberate fire at a bus storage yard in Chadwell St Mary destroyed approximately 36 buses.
The comparison is not quite like for like, because the national figure counts incidents rather than vehicles, and because a fire in June 2026 falls into the following statistical year. But it makes the point. One night in Essex removed several times more buses from service than the country normally loses to deliberate fire in a year, and it did so at a site that most fire risk assessment practice barely addresses.
Seven weeks on, with the investigation conclusion published, it is worth looking at what the incident actually demonstrates rather than what it looked like on the night.
What happened
Essex County Fire and Rescue Service logged the incident, number 320489, at 6.07pm on 5 June 2026. Crews from Basildon, Grays and Orsett attended.
The service's account is brief. Firefighters were called to a fire involving a number of double decker buses at a bus storage yard in Chadwell St Mary. On arrival crews reported that the fire was quickly spreading among the buses. By 9pm the incident had been reduced to two crews damping down hot spots. The fire destroyed approximately 36 buses.
Station Manager Lee Hurst said: "This was a significant and challenging incident involving a large number of vehicles. Thanks to the hard work and professionalism of our firefighters, supported by Essex Police, utility providers and local farmers, we were able to bring the fire under control and prevent further spread."
He confirmed the finding that matters: "The fire investigation has determined that the fire was started deliberately."
Note the phrase the service uses throughout. Storage yard, not depot. That distinction shapes everything that follows, because a working depot has staff, movement, lighting, a duty manager and usually a building. A storage yard can be a fenced field with vehicles parked in rows and nobody on it after six o'clock.
The wider picture on deliberate fire
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government published fire and rescue incident statistics for the year ending March 2026 on 22 July 2026. They show deliberate fire moving sharply in the wrong direction.
There were 71,520 deliberate fires in England in 2025/26, up from 61,824 the year before, a rise of 15.7 per cent. Set against 170,597 fires of all kinds, deliberate ignition accounted for more than four in every ten fires attended.
Most of that increase is in secondary fires, which rose from 46,309 to 55,647, and the department attributes the wider spike in fires to a hot dry summer rather than to a change in behaviour. Deliberate primary fires were much steadier at 15,858 against 15,493.
Within that, deliberate road vehicle fires numbered 7,183, up from 6,938. Cars account for 4,027 of them and motorcycles 1,462. Buses and coaches account for nine.
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That last number is the useful one. Deliberate bus fires are genuinely rare. Which means an operator reviewing its risk register will find almost no historical basis for treating them as a live threat, right up until the night it happens and the loss is not one vehicle but the whole yard.
Rare and catastrophic is the hardest risk profile to get funded. It is also exactly the profile that fire spread between closely parked vehicles produces.
Is an open yard even within scope?
This comes up constantly, and the answer is clearer than most people assume.
Article 2 of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 defines premises as including "any place" and, in particular, any workplace, any vehicle, vessel, aircraft or hovercraft, any installation on land, and any tent or movable structure. There is no requirement for a building anywhere in that definition.
Article 6 then lists what is excluded, principally domestic premises, offshore installations, ships, mines, borehole sites, agricultural and forestry land away from the undertaking's main buildings, and vehicles used as a means of transport or licensed under the Vehicle Excise and Registration Act 1994. Having listed the exclusions, article 6(2) states that subject to those provisions, "this Order applies in relation to any premises."
So an open vehicle storage yard operated as a workplace is within scope. There is a nuance worth carrying into conversations with clients: the exclusion at article 6(1)(e) means the Order does not regulate the inside of each licensed vehicle, but it plainly regulates the yard those vehicles are standing in. The layout, the perimeter, the waste storage and the access arrangements are all the responsible person's problem.
What the evidence actually says about vehicles catching each other alight
The professional literature here is better than most people realise, and its central finding is uncomfortable.
Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service's protection report into the Kings Dock car park fire of 31 December 2017, which destroyed 1,309 vehicles, states the position plainly: "Fire will spread from vehicle to vehicle in car parks, be they open air, open-sided or enclosed. This has been proved in both simulated experiments in the UK and abroad and in actual incidents."
Open air is in that list. Being outdoors does not protect you.
The report goes on to describe the historical basis of the guidance, and this is the part that should give any assessor pause. The Joint Fire Research Organisation, working for the Ministry of Technology and the Fire Offices' Committee, concluded in 1968 that fire spread from one vehicle to others would not occur, and that if it did, brigades would invariably be in attendance within three to four minutes. That research underpinned the recommendations in Approved Document B. Merseyside notes that the fire resistance requirements under Building Regulations have not increased since the 1968 paper.
When the Department for Communities and Local Government commissioned the Building Research Establishment to revisit the question in 2006 in a three year project titled Fire Spread in Car Parks, the findings included that sprinklers are effective in controlling both developing and fully developed fires, that running fuel fires spread the fire, and that once a very severe fire has developed, fire will spread to other cars separated by an unfilled parking bay.
An empty space between two vehicles is not a fire break. That is the single most transferable finding for anyone laying out a storage yard.
Luton, and why the powertrain is a distraction
The most thoroughly documented recent example is the London Luton Airport Terminal Car Park 2 fire of 10 October 2023, which involved more than 1,300 vehicles and caused a partial structural collapse. Bedfordshire Fire and Rescue Service published a significant incident report in October 2024.
The report identifies the vehicle of origin as a 2014 Range Rover Sport with a 2993cc diesel engine, with the cause recorded as accidental ignition from an electrical fault or component failure. The service had already stated publicly, in March 2024, that "The vehicle involved was diesel-powered, it was not a mild hybrid, plug-in hybrid or electric vehicle."
Two findings in that report translate directly to an open yard. First, on how the fire moved: subsequent radiant heat, in the region of 2.5 to 5 megawatts for a vehicle fire, was sufficient for the ignition of adjacent vehicles. Second, on the effect of being open to the weather: wind on the night was approximately 10mph, and the open sided construction of the car park enabled flames to be fanned and directed towards adjacent vehicles, increasing the speed of fire development.
An outdoor yard has more wind, not less.
On electric vehicles, the government's own guidance is more measured than the commentary around it. The Office for Zero Emission Vehicles published fire safety guidance for electric vehicles in covered car parks in July 2023, prepared by Ove Arup. It states that the data currently available suggests that electric vehicles "do not present an increased likelihood of fire compared to ICEV equivalents," while being honest that the fleet is young and the data is not yet captured consistently. It also notes, fairly, that suppressing a battery fire can take longer and may not be feasible until flammable material has burned, and that the smoke can be more toxic, contaminating firefighting water run off.
The same document confirms that several of its measures apply to vehicle fires in open spaces and to internal combustion vehicles, and makes the spacing argument in plain terms: greater distance means the adjacent vehicle is exposed to less radiant heat and is therefore less likely to become involved.
The honest reading is that powertrain changes the firefighting problem but not much about the spread problem. Vehicle size and spacing do more.
The guidance gap, stated honestly
There is no national UK guidance document specific to bus depots or open vehicle storage yards. What exists is car park guidance and general arson prevention guidance, and practitioners are left to reason across.
The most useful general document is RC48, Arson prevention: the protection of premises from deliberate fire raising, developed through RISCAuthority and published by the Fire Protection Association. Its section 7 deals with vehicles, and although it is written with staff and visitor parking in mind, the recommendations survive translation:
Car parks should where possible be within sight of the business premises and segregated from vehicle loading and delivery areas.
Access to car parks should be controlled, so as to prevent entry by unauthorised vehicles and pedestrians.
Parking areas should be remote from outside storage areas, including those used for the storage of combustible waste materials.
Loaded vehicles left parked outside premises at night may be a target, and unless unavoidable the practice should not habitually be followed.
On the perimeter, RC48 is direct. The perimeter fence or wall is described as the first line of defence, which must present both an imposing obstacle and a psychological deterrent, with security fencing and gates reaching a height of at least 2.4 metres. On external combustible storage it specifies a clear space of at least 10 metres from buildings and structures.
Essex County Fire and Rescue Service's own arson prevention advice sets a different figure for skips, saying they should normally be a minimum of six metres from any part of the premises, and adds a practical specification for CCTV, which to support a prosecution needs to be four megapixels and 1080p resolution. Where two sources give different separation distances, use the more demanding one and record why.
What a responsible person can actually do
Nothing here requires a suppression system in a field. The measures that follow from the evidence are mostly layout and housekeeping.
Break the rows. Continuous lines of closely parked vehicles are a fire spread path. Park in blocks with real gaps, and remember that an empty bay is not enough.
Keep vehicles away from the boundary. Most deliberate ignition comes through or over the fence. Distance from the perimeter is free.
Remove the fuel that is not a vehicle. Waste, pallets, tyres and skips near parked vehicles convert a nuisance fire into a yard fire.
Treat the fence as the primary control, not the alarm. In an open yard with no detection, the perimeter is doing most of the work.
Specify CCTV for evidential quality, not reassurance. A camera that cannot identify anyone has cost you money and bought nothing.
Ask what a total loss actually means. If every vehicle on the site burns, does the operation continue? For a yard holding a large share of a fleet, that is a business continuity question, not just a fire one.
Report suspicious activity. Essex, in common with a number of services, directs information to the anonymous FireStoppers line on 0800 169 5558.
One thing to watch
The Building Safety Regulator and MHCLG ran a review of Approved Document B, which was published on 25 March 2026 and closed on 1 July 2026. The consultation is now in analysis. Among the listed proposals is one to increase the structural fire resistance rating of open-sided car parks.
That will not reach open storage yards, which have no structure to rate. But it is an acknowledgement, nearly sixty years after the research that set the current standard, that assumptions about how far a vehicle fire will travel were set for a different fleet.
The buses at Chadwell St Mary did not need a building to burn.
