Putting out those fires

THE devastating fires that have ravaged communities in the Western Cape this week have again highlighted the courage of firefighters and rescue workers.

The tragedy that is unfolding has claimed eight lives, with reports indicating that they are from the same family, and hundreds have been evacuated. By yesterday, more than a week after the fires started, hundreds more were being evacuated from Rheenendal outside Knysna.

But a year on from the fires that devastated Knysna last year, questions are again being raised about disaster management plans and the strategy to deal with disasters when they occur.

In September, Bafana Mazibuko, the outgoing president of the Disaster Management Institute of Southern Africa, was brutally honest about the state of disaster management in the country, saying the country was 10 years behind in terms of establishing concrete disaster management policies.

“We don’t have a proper risk assessment policy, and if you look at the capacity of the institutions that are meant to deal with these disasters, they are not aligned to do what the act requires them to do,” Mazibuko said.

The Disaster Management Act was promulgated in 2002 – 16 years ago – and its requirements should have already been implemented at district municipalities and metros.

For any disaster management plan to work and for lives to be saved, the government and institutions that have been tasked to provide aid must be on the same page.