Fighting disasters with outdated equipment

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Imagine that your car broke down and the mechanic turns up with tools meant to repair a bicycle. This is the situation facing us, as the Fire and Rescue Service Department has only outdated machinery in its possession. It is not just the equipment side that the department is facing lack of modernisation.  There haven’t been any major amendments in the State Fire Force Act, under which the department came into existence in the state in 1962.   ‘’The equipments used by the Service are not updated periodically. We still use water tenders (tankers) that are over two decades old for rescue operations,’’ said a Fire officer.  The Service still lacks modern equipment like a Skylift used for rescue operations in high-rise buildings, which are imperative today. ‘’We had two such equipments about 20 years ago. But both became defunct as no one knew how to repair them. Following this, no such equipments were purchased,’’ said the officer, who has been serving the department for the past two decades.   The Fire and Rescue personnel are of the opinion that all modernisation processes done in the department are an eyewash.  ‘’The government spends crores of rupees to import modern equipment. What they forget to do is to sign a contract with dealer for the equipment’s periodic maintenance. What happens as a result is that the equipment dies after its use a few times as no one here knows how to repair it,’’ said another official. The hydraulic equipments, including hydraulic cutters imported from Germany last year, belong to this category.  Their woes do not end there. The department received its first batch of water tenders with power steering only in 2010, over a decade after power steering vehicles were introduced in the country.   Another major problem is the shortage of manpower. The total strength of the department in the state is just about 3,000, out of which a few hundred posts are lying vacant. However, the government does not seem to have taken this fact into account when it opened about 100 new fire stations across the state last  year, which further scattered the existing strength.