Minister for the Interior, Ambrose Dery has charged the Ghana
National Fire Service (GNFS) to collaborate with other security and emergency
services to adopt emergency standards operating procedures.
At the opening of the 11th Directors’ and Regional Fire
Officers’ Conference yesterday in Accra, he said such procedures will go a long
way to minimize fatalities especiallyduring national emergencies.
In a speech read on his behalf by his Deputy, Mr Henry Quartey,
he further challenged the service to build its capacity to meet the numerous
challenges of an emerging petro-chemical industry.
The two day conference dubbed “Transformational Leadership
for efficient service delivery” will afford participants the platform to
brainstorm on issues confronting and ways to address them.
Mr Dery commended the service for its timely invention during
the Atomic Junction Fire that helped minimize the situation, saying “This is
what Ghanaians expects from its trained and experienced fire men.”
On incidents of fire, he said 3,377 outbreaks were recorded
from January to September (First three quarters) of 2017 as compared to 5,638
in the same period last year,
indicating a 41 per cent decrease.
He said the estimated cost
of damage , so far this year, was
nearly 27 million compared to about 91million last year, also showing a decrease.
However, he said “Let’s not rest on our laurels. We still
have an uphill task in this regard. We must continue to strive to bring down fire
outbreaks to the barest minimum.”
In this regard, the Minister charged the fire service to scale up its mass sensitization and
education drive to drum home the safety fire consciousness in the citizenry.
Mr Dery assured the GNFS of government’s commitment to
support it in the areas of human resource, logistics and other needs to enable it
effectively executive its mandate.
Acting Chief Fire Officer, Mr Edwin Ekow Blankson, said
efforts were being made to provide every Indecent Responder with a dedicated
Fire Proactive Clothing to prevent communicable diseases among Incident
Respondents.
He said the GNFS will
also have Fire simulators of international standards to facilitate the training
of fire fighters to effectively fight industrial and domestic fire.
He expressed gratitude to government for its support and stressed
GNFS’ commitment to its fire prevention and management mandate and will bring up pragmatic solutions to move the service
forward.
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