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11,000 homeless from fire - False alarms stretching brigade’s resources

Published:Monday | October 28, 2019 | 12:09 AMAndre Williams/Staff Reporter
Members of the Jamaica Fire Brigade on the scene of the burning Auto Spares House, located on Lyndhurst Road in the vicinity of Calvary Cemetery, on Tuesday, July 16, 2019.
Members of the Jamaica Fire Brigade on the scene of the burning Auto Spares House, located on Lyndhurst Road in the vicinity of Calvary Cemetery, on Tuesday, July 16, 2019.

With more than 11,000 Jamaicans being made homeless as a result of fire over a five-year period, firefighters are ramping up a safety-and-awareness campaign to reduce the incidence of blazes that cause death, displacement, and trauma.

The initiative, timed to coincide with the start of Fire Awareness Week, will fan out to engage approximately 100 communities in a bid to spread the message of prevention and caution.

A whopping 11,031 Jamaicans were rendered homeless by fire between 2014 and 2018. During the period, there were 145 fatalities, 29 of whom were children. Four hundred and thirty people suffered injuries.

Of concern to commissioner of the Jamaica Fire Brigade Stewart Beckford is the almost eight per cent spike in emergency fire responses up to September 2019 when compared to the corresponding period last year, even though deaths have fallen by half, to 23.

“As an organisation, we have long realised that to significantly put a dent in the occurrence of fires, we have to focus our efforts on our communities to get them to be aware of the dangers of fires and what they can do to reduce or prevent fires,” he said during a media launch at the Police Officers’ Club in St Andrew on Friday.

MALICIOUS FALSE ALARMS

But Beckford believes that fire responses could have been even more efficient if the brigade’s resources had not been stretched in attending to 6,253 malicious false-alarm calls, which represent almost 10 per cent of the 66,223 emergency reports received between 2014 and 2018.

Firefighters are caught in a catch-22.

“[We] can’t sit at the station when we get a call and make a determination that the call is false or it is genuine, so we have to respond once we get a call,” Beckford told the launch.

The brigade is also calling on parents to be more responsible and to desist from delegating children to take care of younger siblings.

“This year, we have lost four [children], and that’s four times too many. We continue to see incidents of fire that are very preventable. Simple safety measures could have been prevented in all, if not in most, instances. If you have to leave the house, get an adult to stay with the child or children,” he added.

Fire Awareness Week, which is being celebrated under the theme ‘Mek Wi Fix It … Community First’, is being staged for the 24th year. The week will be rounded out with community interventions, street-corner talks, media broadcasts, and forums.

Emeleo Ebanks, senior deputy superintendent for fire prevention and public relations officer at the brigade, said that the awareness campaign was focused on reducing fire incidence, building stronger ties with residents, and spearheading targeted intervention programmes.

He also sought to refute the notion that responders were slow to fire scenes.

“I am here to debunk that myth. We understand as emergency responders [that] a minute, when you are caught in an emergency, when your life depends on somebody else, it’s like an hour, and, in some instances, it’s like a day,” Ebanks said.

“We understand when people say these things. However, we are going to ask the members of the media, ‘No bada promote it,’” he said.

andre.williams@gleanerjm.com