Daily Dispatch
BCM fails to spark with fire engines
BARELY three years after the Dispatch exposed the poor state of Fleet Street Fire Station’s fire engines, nothing seems to have changed as our frontpage story suggests.
At the time the only engine – a 20-year-old ALP2 aerial platform truck – at the “central” station had a fire hose just slightly bigger than a garden hose and a faulty pump.
Once rated as one of the top-10 fire stations in the world, the state of the station proved that Fleet Street Fire Station had declined to a shabby shadow of its former glory, with doors broken, filthy floors and walls and a poorly organised supply store.
Today this newspaper is leading with a story which paints a similarly bleak picture – suggesting the rot that set in at Fleet Street three years ago, has spread to all of Buffalo City Municipality’s seven fire stations.
This despite the municipality setting aside R18-million in 2015 to buy a new fleet of fire engines.
Three new fire engines were budgeted for at the time. But today’s story suggests that there is nothing to show for that expenditure as the problems persist.
Frankly our fire service is non-existent and a dangerous recipe for disaster.
It is no exaggeration therefore to imagine what would happen to our city if we faced just half of what the community of Knysna and other parts of the Southern Cape had to deal with over the past few weeks.
Information at our disposal shows that only two of the six existing engine trucks were operational last week, as the rest had been taken in for repairs.
Just two days ago, the community of Amalinda had to deal with a fire which threatened their homes and had to take matters into their own hands, with hosepipes and buckets to put out the veld fire. Only later did a fire engine arrive after they had been battling the blaze for a while.
All of this is happening at a municipality where ratepayers have to fork out a monthly R45 fire levy. This amount is likely to increase next month as other rates and services will be increasing by at least 4% from July 1. The question is where do these levies go if BCM is unable to guarantee that a fire engine will be dispatched when a fire breaks out? The situation is as dire at King Sabatha Dalindyebo in Mthatha, where firefighters have had to devise tricks just to get through a day’s work.
A Mthatha firefighter is quoted as saying: “We have to use potatoes to smear on the windscreen when rain falls because the wipers are not working.”
Other stories are more devastating as another firefighter told of how they recently lost a colleague to a fire.
“We are exposing ourselves to danger every time we go out and fight a fire. The protective clothing we wear is of poor quality. Recently one of us almost died when the jacket caught fire.”
Clearly this death was preventable, if only the municipality had provided the basic requirement of a firefighter’s job – protective clothing. The city bosses at BCM and KSD should hang their heads in shame.