Each year the fire services week is observed from 14-20 April, to honor the memory of 66 fire services personals who lost their lives in a fire and explosion at Victoria Dock Mumbai in 1944. The department launches several public engagement initiatives including the release of a fire safety documentary showcasing real-life fire fighting missions and the role of emergency services, release of posters, banners and hand bills for public awareness lectures, essay writing, painting competitions, health check up for jawans and public and medical first aid programs.
This year’s theme is “Unite to Ignite a Fire Safety India” , which emphasizes collective responsibility and community involvement in fire prevention. From it’s primary duty of preventing accidental fires, which cause huge property loss and sometimes claims precious lives also, the fire and emergency services remain at forefront during natural calamities. During the devastating floods of 2014, apart from state and national disaster response forces, our military and paramilitary forces including fire fighters, helped people to a great extent to take a sigh of relief during testing times.
During the national festival of Independence Day and Republic Day celebrations at national capital and state capitals, the energetic and enthusiastic soldiers of this force display miraculous skills and stunts, revealing their capability and efficiency to deal with crises and challenging situations. In schools, hospitals and other public offices and places, the department regularly conducts workshops and awareness campaigns to aware people especially our women folk, who often remain busy in kitchens for household chorus, about disaster management and firefighting techniques, aiming to reduce the property and human loss during fire related incidents.
However, the long dry spell and scanty snowfall recorded during this year’s winter period, has posed bigger challenges before the department to deal with any kind of adversity and tragedy. Our lofty mountains and high altitude peaks, which earlier would be blanketed by a thick cover of silvery snow for months together, are now completely bald. There is strong likelihood of facing scarcity of drinking water as well as water for irrigation purposes, besides making it extremely difficult to extinguish the fire in case of an emergency. Nowadays as we witness, our green gold is catching regular and intermittent fires, across all the regions of Jammu kashmir, causing huge loss and posing a great threat to wildlife there also.
Forest fires in Pirpanchal regions, South and North Kashmir areas have caused a heavy devastation recently, necessitating to make men and machinery always alert to meet an untoward eventuality. There can be many causes of forest fires, but awareness campaigns and conducting seminars in educational institutions alone can’t make wonders unless we as a whole work together in a team sprit to conserve our precious natural resources which sustain our livelihood and maintain ecological balance. The department of fire services, besides equipping it’s officials with the latest tools to mitigate the fires in the residential and commercial areas, must also train them to extinguish fires in the forest areas. As we have seen recently the officials of forest department alongside the unequipped general public alone couldn’t bring down the fires in forest areas. Therefore a comprehensive mechanism and practicable strategy is need of the hour to bring an end to the increasing forest fires and conserving our invaluable green gold. It is dwelling place to thousands of living species, besides a treasure trove of countless herbal plants.
In residential areas, the frequent devastating fires leave hundreds of people homeless and property worth crores get lost in hours. To cite some examples, the fires of Kishtwar, Kadipora Anantnag, Baramulla, Sonamarg and Bandipora have left people homeless and property worth billions was razed to ground within hours. To minimize such incidents in near future both in residential areas and woods, and in order to protect people and their property, the department should adopt latest procedures and techniques besides making use of modern technology and suggesting government to devise plans to reduce the chances of imminent fires. As responsible citizens, it is our fundamental duty to save our natural resources especially forests and at a time when we are witnessing rising cases of forest fires, we must prepare ourselves to mitigate the concerning situations. Bringing stronger legislations to restrict human entries in woods can also prove to be a wonderful idea.
Author can be mailed at rayeeskumar31@gmail.com
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