Today is Independence Day. This year it hardly represents an occasion for celebration, and the government was right to convert the planned festivities in Lethem to a night of remembrance and prayer for the children who died at Mahdia. This is a very small society and no matter how geographically remote from the tragedy a community is, there will be few persons who will not be moved by it and whose thoughts days later will not still be dominated by it.
Given the degree to which the nation as a whole has been affected, never mind the families of those who died and were injured, the government should not be surprised that so many questions are being asked. There is no point in it withholding information, more particularly since international news agencies were provided with some particulars attributed to a government source which were not given to local media. Those details are now all over the planet, and so the authorities should place as much data as they are aware of in the local arena, if only to help inhibit wild speculation.
And there are still many questions to be answered, beginning with how the fire started. The public has been told a female student in the dorm was suspected to be responsible, and while it would have been easy enough for her to obtain matches, what did she set alight in a bathroom area? There were mattresses stored nearby, it seems, so did she put a match to them? It is true they would have burnt easily since they were made of foam, but alternatively could she have poured an accelerant on the bathroom floor? If the latter, what was it, and where did she get it? At the very least it would account for the speed of the fire, although Home Affairs Minister Robeson Benn has explained that after the mattresses caught alight “the fire got into the plastic-type ceiling and proceeded along the roof with burning pieces falling onto beds which are of sponge; it went very quickly.”
Inevitably a lot of the questions have revolved around what arrangements were in place in the event of a fire. The windows unfortunately were grilled, something which was perhaps inevitable given that this was a single-flat building and the students would have been vulnerable without the grillwork. The five wooden doors were locked from the inside, and the house mother had to be woken up by the girls to unlock the main door. This was a situation which required special precautions in the event of a fire, precautions which were clearly lacking.
The thing about Guyana is that after fifty-seven years of independence, we have an excellent record on the writing of reports, the making of recommendations and the undertaking of reviews, but there is still a huge gulf between this and the implementation of whatever is recommended. The number of reports on which no action has been taken that are gathering dust on official shelves must run into the hundreds. And sadly the case of the Mahdia Secondary School dormitory seems to follow the standard pattern.
As we reported yesterday the Mahdia arm of the Fire Service identified the fire hazard that the dormitory building represented when it carried out an inspection in November of 2022.
A report with recommendations was subsequently handed over to the relevant authorities which was then sent on to Georgetown, while recommendations for working fire extinguishers were also made to the dormitory. A follow-up inspection was carried out in February of this year, when it was found that none of the recommendations had been implemented. We noted that all government buildings in Mahdia and not just the dormitory had been inspected by the Fire Service, and that none of the recommendations had been executed for any of them either.
When this newspaper approached Regional Executive Officer Peter Ramotar about the action taken since the submission of the recommendations, he responded: “I don’t know what you would determine as adequate, but no, we don’t have sprinkler systems and alarms or fire buckets but there are some fire extinguishers.”
While sprinkler systems in Mahdia would not be feasible, fire buckets with sand certainly would be, and as our editorial on Wednesday suggested, a bell could always substitute for an electronic fire alarm. Some clarification is still needed, however, on the matter of the fire extinguishers since Minister Benn, acting Fire Chief Dwayne Scotland as well as a resident, Mr Parkinson John told this newspaper initially that a single fire extinguisher was found outside the building. Subsequently Mr Scotland said that empty fire extinguishers were found but it was not clear whether they came from inside the dorm or from external efforts to fight the fire.
Even supposing there were fire extinguishers, had any of the students been trained in how to use them? Given the amount of panic on the night in question, it does not appear there had been any fire drills with senior students functioning as prefects or marshals. This was confirmed by Mahdia Mayor David Adams who told this newspaper that from his independent investigations the students had not had fire drills and neither was the building equipped with fire escapes and extinguishers.
Then there was the matter of why the Mahdia branch of the Fire Service was so ill-equipped to respond to the kind of situation it faced on Sunday night. Its water tanker soon ran out, and then they had to source water. In addition, a source told Stabroek News, they were hampered getting to the compound because residents who responded with their vehicles parked haphazardly. One can only ask, where were the police at a time like that? They should have taken charge of that situation. The Fire Service too lacked specialist equipment such as sledgehammers and hydraulic rescue tools. Certainly the former would have been of great assistance when the firemen tried to break holes in the walls to allow children to escape. As it was they had to rely on axes and 4×4 lengths of lumber.
Contact with the fire station seems to have been an issue, because the firemen were alerted when citizens ran there to tell them about the fire. Minister Benn told this newspaper on Tuesday that they would have to upgrade their fire prevention activities and conduct an extensive review of what was in place. Surely in this day and age money is not a problem in terms of equipping the service and training its officers so they are in a position to fight fires in a professional manner whether that is in Mahdia or Georgetown or wherever else.
Security does not come within Mr Benn’s purview, and the public has yet to hear from Education Minister Priya Manickchand about whether there was a security guard on duty on the fateful night, and if there was at what point he noticed the fire and what he did then. Her ministry too could insist on fire drills in all schools, as advised by the Fire Service.
This is a fire-prone country for reasons which are well known, and there has been a history of fires in our schools too. Apart from those involving loss of life mentioned in Wednesday’s editorial, there has been a spate of fires where no injuries occurred in more recent times. Two of these ‒ St George’s and Christ Church – involved the total destruction of the school buildings. However, we have had nothing of the character and scale of Mahdia before and this time the public expects that the government will move beyond reviews and recommendations to implementation.
The parents of nineteen children will never see them grow up, and will have to endure the pain of their loss for the duration of their lives. Action on school safety will not bring them back; it will just give other parents greater confidence that the school system offers hope for their children’s future, not the extinction of that future.