While the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry is to be commended for the unfailing focus on fire prevention in its promotional and public relations initiatives that target mostly the urban business community, one wonders just how much impact its efforts are having and, indeed, whether those efforts are attracting the attention of what one might call critical audiences.
If, as we learnt from the Chamber recently, the customary attendees at its fire prevention discourses are mostly “representatives of corporate bodies” then the Chamber will have to refocus its initiative as a matter of urgency if its efforts are to have any real effect.
Truth be told, the corporate entities pose nowhere near as serious a fire-related threat as do the smaller downtown merchants who ply their trade from decaying downtown buildings, storing larger and larger volumes of combustible material inside and continually adding to the number of electrical devices hooked up to antiquated electrical wiring.
Accordingly, and even the Fire Chief does not deny this, commercial Georgetown literally lives with the inevitability of a major fire at intervals. No one seriously doubts that these fires are largely avoidable though no one, it seems, is prepared to put their fingers on the problem. It is, simply, that we continue to dwell in an atmosphere of what one might call commercial lawlessness, a condition in which merchants transgress fire safety regulation with impunity while the authorities appear either unable or unwilling to rein in the transgressors of laws governing fire safety standards; things such as the renovation of electrical wiring, the storage of combustible material, the creation of safe exits and the acquisition of functional fire extinguishers.
Oddly enough, these transgressions are out there in the open and it is as though the transgressors operate under some kind of immunity. Again, when we have asked the Fire Chief he has said that enforcement of the laws governing fire safety in commercial Georgetown is not without its problems. We believe that he spoke with us with his tongue firmly in his cheek since when we asked elsewhere we were told that the transgressors may well be benefiting from the protection of some kind of higher authority.
The efforts of the chamber are largely wasted if it continues to miss its real target audience altogether, if those who pose the real danger continue, unchecked, to expose us to the risk of sudden, devastating fires in the commercial capital, so that we must either take action to hold the transgressors to account or understand that whatever options we choose to pursue the problem will persist and the next major fire will come anyway.
