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Jun 18, 2003

Fire drills hone skills of fire-fighters, public

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It’s a practice the Fire Department conducts regularly, and while supposedly surprise fire drills are seldom surprising to those involved, they still serve an important purpose. Today I followed the trucks to the scene of the latest mock blaze.

Janelle Chanona, Reporting

It began with a piercing siren that sent employees rushing to their safety spots. To all concerned, the fire looked real.

It was in fact a stimulated exercise coordinated between Belize Electricity Limited and the National Fire and Rescue Service. Under the watchful eye of senior personnel, both fire fighters and B.E.L. employees would be evaluated on their actions during the drill.

And this was no ordinary drill…just as the wail of fire trucks responding to the “emergency” was heard in the distance; smoke from the second floor of one of the buildings filled the air.

Employees informed fire fighters of the situation and the officers sprang into action.

In the darkness of a strange and smoke filled room where visibility drops to nothing, fire fighters must find the source and search for anyone still inside the building.

In a back office, the officers find their “victim”. He has been overcome by smoke and has injured one of his legs. He needs medical attention immediately.

Fire-fighter

“Which part ah yuh foot di hot yuh sah?”

Victim

“Right foot.”

Fire Fighter

“Yuh right foot. Alright, take it easy and we will get you out right now.”

Their casualty secure, the fire-fighters finish fighting the “blaze”. But was the simulation close enough to reality? A secret is hard to keep in a corporate environment and Belize Electricity Limited is no exception. Despite a few leaks, B.E.L.’s Phillip Waight considers the exercise a success.

Phillip Waight, B.E.L. Spokesperson

“We expect when we start to spring it either on a more frequent basis or on a plan basis for us, but not for them, we’ll see them better respond. But I think they all evacuated the building and they accounted…we had floor marshals, who accounted for the people on each floor. So they came out and they did the job well. We got everybody out of the building in something like five or so minutes, so it was pretty good.”

“We hope to expand our plan further to find out evacuating vehicles and all that, but right now we’re just doing the primary aspect of evacuating people.”

As for the fire department, Operations Manager Michael Middleton says while their response time was excellent, several errors were made.

Michael Middleton, Operations Manager, Fire Service

“The positioning of the trucks too near to the building and stuff like that. The rescuing of the persons trapped inside took a little time, only one team went up the actual rescue and no one else came behind to do the actual fire-fighting, so the team that did the rescue is the same team that had to do the actual fire-fighting.”

Janelle Chanona

“So these mistakes, how are you going to go about fixing them when the real things happen?”

Michael Middleton

“Well normally in a real situation this won’t really happen, because actually if there was a fire here, definitely the guys wouldn’t have parked this close to the building. So this is one of the problems we always encounter whenever there is a simulation exercise. Although we try to put it in their heads to rectify that, it still continues to happen.”

Hopefully, customers turned away and employees asked to wait in the sun, will only have to do so in a drill and not the real thing. And as one concerned citizen points out, we could all take safety a little more seriously.

Phillip Waight

“You see we are a macho type people who take safety as a small issue, not realising how much people we’re killing. Our driving habits are dangerous, our riding bicycle habits. One of the things that we hope to have here on Saturday is telling the kids how to ride safely with the proper helmet and stuff, so we hope to have a whole course outline for the kids to ride and have a safety procedure. So we think, yes, all companies should try to endeavour and reach a necessary safety level.”




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