There was something ‘mighty peculiar’ about the picture captioned `Firemen during the inspection’ taken (as the caption indicates) by the Ministry of Home Affairs outside its Brickdam complex, which appeared on the front page of the Stabroek News of Friday October 8, partially captioned ‘Readiness check.’ It came across as one of those awkward official attempts at damage-limitation that appeared to seek to serve the purpose of helping to salvage the image of a ‘beaten up’ Guyana Fire Service that had, in the preceding days, endured a relentless official pounding for what was thought to be its considerable underperformance at the scene of the fire that had, on the preceding Saturday, destroyed the Brickdam Police Station. The image of the four less than upbeat-looking fire fighters in the aforementioned picture, an assortment of equipment associated with fire-fighting lying on the ground in front of them outside the Ministry would hardly have made a great deal of sense to a presumed target audience the majority of whom are unlikely to know a great deal about the profession.
In truth, whatever the intention behind the Ministry making the picture available to the media it appeared to do no more than serve as, hopefully, an after-the-fact ‘lessons learnt’ visual image. It also raises the question as to the periodicity of such public ‘readiness checks” rather than reinforce the fact of the regularity of such checks. Nor did it seem to represent anything even remotely resembling damage limitation. It had come in the wake of a circumstance in which the President himself, based on reports that he would have received appeared to be in no position to do much more than deliver a “poor at best” assessment of the performance of the Fire Service. Indeed, at the end of the day, it seemed that it was as much the political pounding as the performance of the Fire Service that triggered the sending on leave of the hapless Fire Chief.
The first thing that should be said about the tragedy of the near complete destruction of the buildings housing the Brickdam Police Station is that no one (or institution) would have been keen to ‘carry the can’ for the sudden, ‘high day time’ destruction of one of the capital’s handful of remaining iconic building complexes. This is precisely why, one feels, that long before the embers of the ruins had ceased to smoulder the police high command must have felt itself under pressure to account for what was, in effect, an enormous national tragedy. Here it should be noted that, with lightning speed, the Force trotted out an account of how the fire had started, securing a confession from one of the occupants of the lock-ups, and had him arraigned in court in short order. Truth be told, it appeared to come as no great shock to many observers when, in court, the alleged arsonist denied ever having tendered a confession to the police notwithstanding the fact that the Force claims to be in possession of a videotaped confession. Here, it should be noted that the moment the original (police) version of how the fire had started ‘hit the streets’ it was greeted with a widespread ‘pull the other leg’ response from a public possessed of a pre-arranged mindset in the matter of the credibility of the GPF in matters in which someone had to ‘carry the can.’
And even if we accept the opinion of officialdom that the Guyana Fire Service did not shine when confronted with one of the most important challenges that it has had to face in its recent history, didn’t the seemingly hastily staged ‘readiness check” by the Minister and his Permanent Secretary come across much more as an awkward attempt at a measure of damage limitation that ended up being far too transparent to be credible? Not even remotely did the published picture send a robust message that the Guyana Fire Service had learnt from whatever shortcomings had been evident ‘on the day’ and would go back to the drawing board with a view to suitably ‘raising its game” the next time?
Perhaps too, and against the backdrop of the high price that we have had to pay in the destruction of the Brickdam Police Station complex, the Minister of Home Affairs and the various other responsible functionaries will now wake up to the reality of those long-standing limitations that continue to leave the Fire Service light years removed from anything even remotely resembling adequate fire-fighting capability when account is taken of issues like water availability challenges, seriously eroded electrical infrastructure at premises in downtown Georgetown (and elsewhere), the already emerging re-shaping of the urban building profile to take account of the changing shape of the commercial culture and pieces of fire-fighting equipment which, we are told by insiders, really ought to be designated museum pieces but which remain in use and by extension, a substantive threat to the performance levels of the Fire Service.
There are, too, other threats to the effective performance of the Fire Service that include absence of effective enforcement of rules governing fire safety ‘cover’ in commercial buildings in downtown Georgetown and a host of other limitations which, based on conversations with experienced Fire Officers persist in the teeth of concerns expressed by the Fire Service and frequently in the face of a profound indifference by both the municipality and central government.
There are other questions about the preparedness of our fire-fighting capabilities that should also be answered at this time…like those that have to do with whether our Fire Service is possessed of a capacity commensurate with the extent of its mission in a capital, first, and a country as a whole, that will be growing in many respects in the period ahead and whether, over time, there has been evidence of any serious and wide-ranging incremental upgrading of the ability of the Guyana Fire Service to better position it to match the various building and other transformations that are already beginning to take place in some regions of the country. If indeed there might have been serious errors in judgement (or in the execution of the relevant protocols) by the Fire Station in its execution of the Brickdam Police Station assignment then these should, of course, be investigated and the requisite official responses applied.
`If there have been, over time, similar public Guy-ana Fire Service kit inspections exercises involving senior functionaries outside the Ministry of Home Affairs then we are certainly not aware of those. Frankly, there are those who would argue that the display outside the Ministry last week may actually have had the effect of rubbing the Fire Service’s nose in what had been its earlier humiliation encountered in the ashes and ruin that had been left behind by the fire.