To understand how badly-equipped we are to deal with fires, one just needs to take a stock of the fire-fighting capability of Kathmandu valley. Kathmandu’s Juddha Fire Brigade (JFB) has been functioning with just two fire engines for the last 22 years although the population of the metropolis has gone up by at least a million in that time span. Lalitpur just has one fire brigade while Bhaktapur has another two. Though the Tribhuvan International Airport has seven fire engines, they have to stay at standby to respond to emergencies. Because of the dearth of fire brigades, the JFBs have to regularly depend on the police and the army, who have a fire engine each. We do not need a rocket scientist to tell us that in a valley that is estimated to be home to about 4 million people, the number of fire engines at our disposal is far from adequate.
Unfortunately, the sorry story of our fire-fighting capability does not end with the insufficient number of fire engines. What compounds the problem further is the fact that there aren’t enough water refill sites at convenient distances, thus greatly slowing down the fire-extinguishing work. This is nothing short of blasphemy in a job where a few seconds can go on to become the difference between life and death. Add to this our narrow and crowded streets where fire engines sometimes cannot even enter, leave alone be of any help. And in what is perhaps a classic example to prove that the right hand of our authorities do not know what their left hand is doing, the Department of Urban Development has given permission to construct 22-storey buildings when we only have the capability to douse fires just up to 10 stories.
The problem is further aggravated by the fact that the job is carried out by an understaffed fire fighting staff who are anything but motivated because they have to perennially risk their lives in the absence of fireproof clothing and filter masks. Surprisingly, the fire fighters are not even insured. When we are already overburdened by a host of other pressing problems, it becomes imminent to overhaul the entire fire fighting machinery in order to prevent a catastrophe, which we are in no position to tackle, from occurring. Prevention, after all, is any day better than cure.