An elderly woman has died in a blaze at her home.
Fire crews were called to a property on Hillend Place in Greenock, Inverclyde, yesterday afternoon.
The blaze is believed to have started in the kitchen of the 74-year-old's home.
Scottish Fire and Rescue Service officials reminded householders not to leave cooking appliances unattended.
Local senior officer Paul Tanzilli said: "This tragic incident is a stark reminder of the awful consequences of fire within the home and the thoughts of all emergency responders will be with the family and friends of the lady who has died.
"Despite firefighters reaching the incident in less than four minutes, we are faced with the horrible reality that a member of our community has lost her life.
"An investigation will take place into the cause of this fire, however we should all act now to ensure our homes and those of people around us are fire safe.
"We know that even small fires can produce lethal levels of toxic smoke, which can quickly move beyond where the fire is located to spread throughout a property.
"It is essential that every property is protected by working smoke alarms, which give anyone inside vital time to get to safety if a fire does start.
"Cooking appliances should never be left unattended while they are in use and anything that could easily catch fire - like kitchen roll or towels - must be kept well away from cookers."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article