Fires by their nature do not provide pause for reflection

Nov 04, 2009 Letters

Dear Editor,
Fires constitute an emergency that demands the utmost urgency. Fires normally are rapacious, their appetites ragingly seeking every type of material on which to blaze.
In recent months one gets the impression of too high an incidence of these conflagrations both in the urban and rural areas. The physical destruction, however substantial, can never compare with the devastation of livelihoods, and life’s prospects, and the crushing impact on human mind and spirit.
It can never be enough to help victims escape with their sparse worldly goods; or to report, however sympathetically, on the plight of the dis-employed when businesses are reduced to ashes. Temporary relief may be a balm, but certainly does not heal. Insurance may be a comfort to which preference would only reluctantly resort.
In the confusion there is a discussion about the timeliness and quality of the fire-fighting capability, about the ownership of the water shortages so prevalent in the heated circumstances. Then the heat of the argument cools until the experience is repeated; and we pray that the next hot seat is someplace far away from our own location.
Somehow fiery rhetoric does not appear to yield to cool analysis of the range, frequency and cause of these eruptions; nor to an examination of the extent to which lack of planning of town and country may have contributed to avoidable incidents, in more than one instance.
A cursory glance, as one proceeds through the city traffic, easily identifies buildings, including commercial buildings, increasingly being erected in too close a proximity to each other, for their respective safety. The authorities concerned have either condoned or ignored this development, or both. But this dereliction of the duty of ensuring the implementation of the statutory requirements pales against the more fundamental demand for a substantive reorganisation of comparatively limited urban space being chaotically filled by structures and facilities that only increase the burden of delivery of services needed to support and protect them.
There is, for example, the platitudinous remark published in the press, to the effect that the expansion of the Diamond Housing Scheme on the East Bank, Demerara, contributed to power shortages being experienced. In the same breadth this was stark admission of the lack of planning. At the other end of the line can be heard the very power supply being blamed for fuelling a particular fire.
One can only hope that enough lessons have been learnt to ensure that the very Housing Scheme in question is appropriately protected by the adequate supply of dampening water. There should be no debate about which agency is responsible for supplying this populous site.
Back in Georgetown, however, there are all the elements of major conflagration – a matter that should be of immediate concern to business owners. The populace seems to have become progressively programmed over time, as not to observe the clear and present danger contained in the massive queues (pile-ups) of buses and taxis, which incidentally make Stabroek Market and environs so unaesthetic a sight from a tourist’s perspective.
Since the Headquarters of the Guyana Fire Service is virtually enclosed in this standing ring of ‘mobility’, one wonders if its officers have even given thought to the possibility of an emergency erupting with the prospect of hundreds of gallons of petrol there for the burning.
Because we have been weaned to mostly a dry weather mentality, we are usually under-prepared for floods that must inevitably come. In the same vein it will be argued that the scenario mooted above is one too exotic to contemplate.
Remember that at the lower end of the scale the individual victims of recent fires, until then may have considered the experience an equally exotic possibility.
We should not just wish for it not to happen. We must plan constructively to prevent such a development by giving priority attention to the reorganisation of the transport system, aimed at mitigating the contentious over-parking in the Stabroek Market environs, and the extended threat to our irreplaceable Parliament Building.
Fires by their nature do not provide pause for reflection
E. B. John

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