BURY'S firefighters dealt with 859 incidents between April and June.

There were 212 fires at properties in the borough and 291 grass or rubbish fires. Crews also responded to 69 malicious calls and there were 212 false alarms.

Bury fire crews also dealt with 75 special service calls to attend road traffic accidents while May proved the busiest month for the borough's brigade.

Neighbouring Bolton had the third highest number of fires in the county, totalling 1,961, and crews there also faced the second highest number of hoax or false alarm calls.

Crews based in Manchester city centre attended the most incidents, 4,428, while riot-hit Oldham had 100 fires in seven days of unrest in May.

Other figures show that as a whole, officers in Greater Manchester dealt with 17,706 calls in the three months, an increase of 1,665 incidents on the same period last year.

In all, 429 people were injured in fires, five of them fatal. Cooking-related fires produced 129 casualties, faulty electrical appliances put 75 people in hospital and 48 people needed treatment after fires were started by discarded smoking materials.