Be prepared – disaster may be at hand!

THE Tegeta secondary school fire should be a lesson to students and parents that there is a need to take precautions and be ready for emergency situations.

This means that when an emergency happens while students are at school, there are must be proper arrangements about how to get the best information from local radio or TV stations.

Parents should know how to get in touch with their children at school so that they can pick them up safely. It helps to have a friend or family member who can pick up a child if the parent cannot.

Probably due to the availability of new technology, it is easier for parents to make a follow up of their children in school by using their mobile phone.

For that matter, parents must make sure that their children know who to call in case of an emergency. They should have the telephone numbers of the carers, that is, the teachers.

This means too that the home phone number should be memorized, as well as the number of a family friend or relative.

Raging conflagrations that have been razing schools have exposed the lack of resources and preparedness for disaster in many institutions.

A good number of school fires are caused either by candles or by electrical faults. The fires are always uncontrollable because of lack of fire extinguishers.

Fires emerge while people watch helplessly as the blaze consumes buildings simply because often there are no fire hydrants to save the situation.

The fire engines who come to put out the fire are always late. At times they even turn up at the scene without enough water.

At the end everyone- school staff and residents included- just watch in awe as a holocaust destroys the buildings.

The booming Dar es Salaam city has not enough fire brigades or engines to cater for the ever-growing population.

But the lack of preparedness for fire fighting in Dar es Salaam is just a microcosm of the lax disaster preparedness in the country as a whole.

It is a fact that the level of preparedness and the kind of responses to major disasters in the country are still very weak.

For instance, the fact that the populous commercial and major city- Dar es Salaam- has only 10 per cent of its fire hydrants working boggles the mind.

A good number of the fire hydrants are down; most of them were displaced in the numerous unplanned constructions that go unbridled in some parts of the city.

And scrap metal dealers are contributing in their own way to the rampant destruction of fire-fighting infrastructure too.

They are said to be stealing fire hydrants for selling to the booming and ever present scrap metal market.

Fire hydrants are supposed to serve as water suppliers at the time of fire outbreaks, but ignorance has had the better part of some city dwellers who destroy the infrastructure with impunity.