Fire Safety in Somerset: Outdoor Sport and Festival Impact

It added that the impacts are already being felt, including early harvests and high risk of wildfires. More than 20 million people are already under hosepipe bans.

Burnham Portable Toilet Hire has spent over thirty years keeping festivals, weddings, agricultural shows and outdoor events across Somerset properly serviced. We started as a family business and we have stayed one, which means the person who answers the phone tends to be the person who already knows your field. Cattle meadows, clifftop weddings, county shows, week-long music camps — we have plumbed the lot. Over three decades we have watched the county’s event scene grow from a scatter of village fêtes into full-weekend campouts drawing thousands through the gate. Remote sites hold no fear for us. We know the lanes, the gateways and the awkward corners that leave bigger operators reversing a lorry back down a single-track road. This summer, the fields themselves have become the story, and every organiser in the region is thinking hard about fire.

The reason is written across the news. Camp Bestival, running this weekend at Lulworth Castle near the Jurassic Coast, has banned camping stoves at tents and disposable barbecues anywhere on site, pointing to the hot weather and dry ground conditions expected. Fireworks, flares, sparklers, lanterns and smoke canisters have gone the same way. That decision sits alongside a run of sensible measures we have seen introduced across Somerset and its neighbouring counties in light of this summer’s wildfires. Below are the ones worth knowing about, drawn from what actually works out on the ground.

Fire safety measures we have watched this summer

Some of these are common sense dressed up in hi-vis. Others take real planning, especially on a site with no mains water and one long track leading in. The measures we see making a genuine difference are these, and a well-run field will have most of them in place before the first tent goes up.

• Water buckets and sand buckets, side by side. Water cools and douses embers and smouldering grass. Sand smothers a fire by starving it of oxygen without splashing burning fuel about, which makes it the right choice beside generators, fuel stores and cooking points.
• Water bowsers trucked into dry fields. Where there is no hose, a mobile water tank becomes the beating heart of the site, feeding everything from hand-washing to firefighting.
• Firebreaks and short-mown grass. Clearing strips of ground between camping zones and cooking areas stops a fire running unchecked across tinder-dry stubble.
• Designated communal cooking areas. Moving all the flame into one supervised zone, well away from the tents, is exactly the approach Camp Bestival has taken.
• Manned fire points with beaters and extinguishers. Trained marshals on radios spot trouble early and knock out creeping grass fires before they take hold.
• Clear access routes for fire engines. A blocked gateway costs minutes nobody has, so keeping the way in open matters as much as anything else on the list.
• Bans on open flame. Disposable barbecues, campfires, lanterns, fireworks and sparklers are the first things to go once the ground turns to tinder.

None of that list is expensive on its own. Put together, it is the difference between a near-miss and a headline. Organisers who plan for the worst tend to have the dullest weekends, which in this line of work counts as the highest compliment going.

Saving water when the taps run dry

Water is the other half of this story, and it is the half people forget until August arrives. Farms and event sites across the county have leaned hard on water butts this summer, those big plastic barrels that catch rainfall off barn and shed roofs. Yes, they are spelled exactly the way you think, and yes, everyone in the trade has made their peace with it. When a hosepipe ban lands, stored rainwater keeps dust down and troughs topped up without troubling the mains supply. It is an old farming trick, and event organisers have borrowed it with real enthusiasm.

The thinking runs deeper than a barrel under a downpipe. A dry field changes how every drop gets used, and the sites that cope are the ones that planned their supply months before the first ticket sold. Greywater gets reused where it safely can. Hand-washing points get sited near a bowser rather than a stretched-out hose run. Waste gets scheduled around water availability rather than the other way round. For anyone running welfare facilities on a remote site, water planning has climbed from afterthought to headline concern in the space of a single dry summer.

Where welfare facilities fit the fire plan

Portable toilets might seem a strange thing to raise in a piece about fire, right up until you follow the water. Every welfare unit on a site needs a supply coming in and a plan for the waste going out, and both of those decisions shape how a field copes under pressure. A supplier who understands remote water logistics is a supplier who understands the wider risk. We site units where they serve the crowd without blocking the access routes a fire engine might need. We work out water delivery for fields the mains has never reached. We coordinate with organisers and, where it matters, with the fire service, so the welfare setup supports the safety plan rather than working against it. Clean, well-placed, well-serviced facilities are part of a properly run event, and a properly run event is a safer one.

The driest ground Somerset has seen in years

None of this caution is an overreaction. June and July 2026 have been brutally dry, with July set to be the driest month England has ever recorded — the country receiving just seven per cent of its expected rainfall, and southern England as little as one per cent. That is barely a rumour of rain. Somerset now sits under official drought status as part of the Wessex region, which covers Dorset, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire too. This is the second summer running that the county has been declared in drought, and the third such year within the past five. The Environment Agency has called the situation exceptionally serious, warning of long-lasting effects on the environment, wildlife and the economy.

The numbers land harder when you picture the ground itself. July 2022 delivered barely twelve millimetres of rain across a single wet day, and this summer has run thinner still. Ground that has gone weeks without proper rain behaves differently underfoot. Grass that would once have smouldered now catches in seconds. A single camping stove near Wareham was enough to destroy a stretch of heathland roughly a hundred metres long earlier this month, which tells you everything about how little it now takes. The bans read as straightforward good sense once you have watched dry stubble go up.

Talk to Burnham Portable Toilet Hire today

Through all of it, the shows go on. They still need clean, reliable welfare facilities, and that is our part of the field. Burnham Portable Toilet Hire provides festival and outdoor event portable sanitation right across Somerset, including the remote corners other firms would rather leave well alone. Even with fuel prices on the climb, our local base keeps us the most competitive operator in the region. Thirty years of family experience means we already know the best route to your gate. Give us a call on 01278 794800, or drop a message on the contact form, and one of our team will call you back as soon as we can.

Image courtesy of Somerset Live. Published July 2026.