Fire Service threatens to boycott duties in unfriendly places

• Launches technology for emergency in remote areas
Federal Fire Service (FFS) says it will be forced to ignore calls from places where youths are becoming unfriendly to fire-fighters that turn up for emergency operations.

The Controller-General, Ibrahim Liman, said this yesterday in Abuja at the launch of a new fire-fighting technology to enhance the service’s operations.

Liman said: “We are doing our best with the state fire service, but what we are receiving from the members of the public is very disappointing; any time our men turn out to respond to emergency, they would not know from which station they were coming and they would start stoning, injuring our staff and destroying our equipment.

“But I have warned before now and I am still warning that any area that is not friendly to us; if there is fire, we will not respond, unless the elders in that place talk to the youths because we cannot afford to lose our very expensive fire equipment.

“I am appealing to the youths to be friendly to our fire-fighters any time they respond to fire-fighting call. But where that one is not achieved, I think I may take the next action by not responding to emergency in that area.”

While testing the new equipment, the FFS boss explained that “the technology is an advanced fire-fighting technology that will be deployed to areas that are not accessible by big trucks.”

According to Liman, the service had deployed similar equipment to places like Imo, Port Harcourt, Ibadan, Yola, Kaduna and Katsina.

He added: “But the advanced type is the one we are about acquiring because we have to go with technology trends.

“The equipment we are about acquiring are used for pick-ups and Hilux. We call it ‘rapid intervention’ and we are trying to acquire this equipment because there are areas that are not accessible by the big truck, so we need to acquire some of these equipment to cover these areas.

“We are looking at 10 units, if possible, next year. But where this one can work effectively is where you already have source of water like borehole. The capacity is 300 litres.”