When three things go wrong together, disasters happen, as Nairobi witnessed on Sunday in the Kijiji slum blaze.
Yet, as people died and thousands were made homeless, the country was treated to little better than scrambled egg accounts of what had caused the fire-fighting failure. Which, in one swift leap, led to a near-instant solution: a political suspension.
It’s an everyday tale, set fair to see another fire, under another politician, or bureaucrat, another day, go just as badly.
For the trick isn’t to hurl abuse at one blameable party or another. The truth is that our history on fire-fighting has been abysmal, in Nairobi, and possibly across Kenya, through multiple political leaderships, and across decades of neglect.
Fixing that requires that we look at the cause of the failure, correct it, and then, and only then, will we get a better fire service. So what went wrong in Kijiji? For a start, a question: You see a fire, what number do you call?
You see, I don’t know – well, I didn’t. I asked other people. And most of them didn’t know either. That’s not a good start in arresting a fire, when there’s only a 1-in-20 chance that the first people to spot it know what number to call.
But it gets worse: of the two people I found who did know, one gave the emergency number 999, which she had used before. She was right. You can report a fire to 999 - if you really do want your house to burn down.
We tried it on Monday. Nice auto-message and music, more music, and then more music. The person who used it before said she waited through 30 minutes of music to get an answer.
A house fire can go from a few flames to an engulfed building, or several, in 30 minutes. There is another number, just for Nairobi – sorry Mombasa fire fenders, and Kisumu readers – which just trips off the tongue: 020-2222181. The one person who knew that number said her landlord had left it on a sign in her kitchen – hats off, landlord!
So, suspending the fire director will now mean Nairobi’s public know the numbers to call for a fire; the emergency 999 will be answered in under 30 minutes; the fire department number will be made memorable; and it will be answered. Good start. That could save the first hour of a Nairobi fire moving to raging.
And then come the fire tenders. Or not. Back to Kijiji: they couldn’t get there – there was no road. So let’s roll the term ‘appropriate technology’. I hesitate to mention it, but much of our city has ‘access’ issues.
‘Dear Nairobi Resident, Do you consider your current premises fully road-accessible by fire tender? Yes/No.’
So there’s the second thing the director’s suspension will achieve – we’ll buy Nairobi-appropriate fire-fighting vehicles that can get down the path all the residents use: like a four-wheel drive, not a metro fire tender. Or rebuild Nairobi faster with roads to everywhere?
Which then gets us to the matter of water. An hour to get the fire tenders called, an hour to get them over the no-road, by then we need a LOT of water, because that’s a big, big blaze right there.
But they ran out of water. Was that because they left the fire station half-empty? Or their tanks were full, and that’s just all the water they carry? That does matter. Truly it does. Neglectful water-filling oversight, or inappropriate tenders?
In fact, most foreign fire tenders are built to run off fire hydrants – those metal knobbly half pillars by roads in fully water-connected countries, which allow fire tenders to plug into the mains water system. Buy a foreign tender and they aren’t built to carry that much water.
Nairobi solution: buy 4WD water tanks to follow the tenders?
If we want to stop fires devastating our city, we need to put in place equipment that can work here, and sort out the emergency reporting number, and publicise it.
Or we could just all say its about politicians and politics - and the insufficient water at the end of that journey - and do it all again next month: more deaths.
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