Firefighters Called to Blaze at BT’s Adastral Park Research Site UPDATE
Multiple Suffolk Fire and Rescue crews were called in late yesterday morning to tackle a blaze at the first floor of an office block on BT’s research and development focused Adastral Park site near Ipswich. The business park is home to around 150 other ICT companies that contribute toward both BT and their own development.
At this stage, little is known about the event, except that Firefighters with seven appliances attended the site just after 10:30am on Saturday (1st March 2025). The fire is understood to have been contained quite quickly, which limited the damage, and the fire was then extinguished just before 2pm.
According to the BBC News, a total of 12 firefighters entered the building wearing breathing apparatus to extinguish the fire. Investigations into the cause of the fire will begin next week and there’s currently no mention of anybody being hurt during the incident. We have approached BT for comment and will update when they respond. Thanks to one of our readers, Ian, for spotting this.
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UPDATE 4:23pm
We’ve been informed that the fire wasn’t in one of BT’s own buildings on the site and no BT asset was impacted. It’s not currently known who was hit.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Well the cause of the fire isn’t going to be their blazingly fast fibre deployment speeds, that’s for sure…
Perhaps it was a legacy GPON ONT catching fire because it was so old 🙂
Installing faster than anyone else.
What would you call fast rollout?
“…average of 13,322 premises being added to the Openreach full fibre footprint every day…”
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/10391-exclusive-november-2024-update-on-openreach-full-fibre-roll-out
Maybe someone forgot to turn off the heat lamp at the Innovation and Incubation Hub at Adastral Park…
Once upon a time Martlesham had it’s own on-site fire brigade made up of volunteers from the workforce there. I think many large industrial campuses did the same.
It still does, two engines unless things have changed very recently. They also have a first responder ambulance. One of my team used to be part of the fire team and the ambulance team saved one of my colleagues after he went into cardiac arrest.
Both of them are only on call during the week though, so it being a Saturday it would have gone to Suffolk Fire & Rescue.