The Chief Fire Officer of Sierra Leone Mr. Nazir Kamanda Bongay has express concern about the increase of fire incidents in Freetown and warned that new residential structures up the hills around Freetown are death traps that must be seriously address by the authority, if we are to prevent a major disaster.
In an exclusive interview with Awoko, Kamanda Bongay disclosed that in the last 12 months, fire incidents in Freetown are on the increase. He said, “Freetown is what we call the picture of Sierra Leone-so if you look at Freetown, in 2011, there was a total of 180 recorded fire incidents which the fire service attended to but if you to go to 2010, the recorded incidents is 150.”
Describing the increase as “significant” he said, “though somebody might say 30 houses may not been that much significant, but to a fire fighter, that is a significant increase in fire situation which we are grappling to handle.”
Mr. Kamanda explained that the fire service over the last twelve months was involved in fire incidents where “we were able to rescue or in some cases removed corpses.” He went further to say, some of the fires involved casualties, injured people and sometimes victim who had been burnt to death.
The shortage of water in many parts of Freetown is another worrying development that has put further strain on the limited resources of the Fire Service Department.
According to Mr. Kamanda, the Fire Service in addition to fire fighting has been responding to calls to rescue people inside water wells.
“We had for the whole of last year-rescuing different people from different waters wells-some we met them dead, some we were able to rescue alive, it was a very severe challenge in Freetown,” he pointed out, during the interview at his Tower Hill office in Freetown.
By Winston Ojukutu-Macauley
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