Durban — Firefighters and emergency services did extraordinary work with passion and without complaint during the week-long July riots in eThekwini.
“I didn’t have one of them come to me saying they were tired and not going back out there, instead they were always looking forward to dealing with the next one, without fail and pause, working flat-out. This made me proud that we have a fire service in eThekwini that can’t be matched,” said the head of the eThekwini fire service, Enock Mchunu.
He recalled that in that period there were 46 warehouse fires which they attended to, adding that one warehouse required a number of resources.
Mchunu said they responded to 54 high-rise building fires, 84 houses and 16 public assembly buildings, as well as 238 stores and shops.
“This was abnormal, it’s unheard of to have 54 high-rise buildings burn in the space of a week. In the space of that week we were able to register 1 300 incidents. In a normal situation in a month we would not reach this type of statistic; on average we fluctuate around 700 every month.”
Mchunu said in the course of that week some of their vehicles broke down. “We had to park off some of these and use what was available as some service providers were unavailable due to the unrest situation to service our vehicles.”
He said the unrest made them realise that they needed more capacity for the coming years.
“Over the years we must start improving in terms of staff numbers, availability of specialised fire-fighting vehicles and equipment. Going forward we need to build on capacity; with training we don’t have a problem because even in the future we know skills-wise we have professional firefighters that we create through our training centre. They are well trained and ready for anything.”
Mchunu highlighted the importance of improving on work with other agencies in joint operations, such as the ambulance services, SAPS and the SANDF.
“When the situation called for us to work together it showed that we are not used to training together. We need to work on exercises and joint training more because the unrest turned into a national issue, forcing all resources and systems of work to function together.”
He said there needed to be standard operating procedures used in such joint operations.
“We also need to look at having specialised units, to know that we have a certain core dealing with floods or hazardous spills; currently we have multiskilled fire-fighters in these. We will need more manpower and resources for this.”
Mchunu said they did not have the budget for more manpower but they needed to plan for a long-term solution.
Kyle van Reenen, of Emer-G-Med Paramedics, said: “A lot of the private ambulance services stood down for the safety of their own crews. Myself and the operations manager and advance life support manned the ambulance services at the KZN branch; we serviced our calls and had to be selective about where we could go based on safety. We wore bulletproof vests during the time and we were in constant contact with the Flying Squad and Pubic Order Policing for our own safety.”
He recalled that late one night they were transporting a critically ill patient, a girl who was under the age of 10, from eThekwini Hospital to Mahatma Gandhi Hospital and as they got onto the R102 approaching the White House area they came under fire.
“It was from people firing at the ambulance with an AK-47; we had to retreat and get out of the area as quickly as possible.”
He said they had also been caught up in the middle of the Massmart warehouse looting as they were evacuating a number of patients from eThekwini Hospital for various reasons.
“We came up just when they started to loot that factory. And when we were coming back down an hour later, we got stuck in what looked like ants to sugar. People were driving fully loaded frontloaders,” he recalled.
Garrith Jamieson of ALS Paramedics Medical Services said at the time, their biggest concern was safety and they waited for a police escort wherever they needed to go.
“The looters were absolutely ruthless, they weren’t fazed by anyone or anything. Our response time to get to patients was affected as most roads were closed and we had to use back routes.
“My instructions were that if there were any signs of danger to withdraw immediately, because the looters outweighed the number of police.”
He said that they also attended to some calls where looters had been injured and it was too volatile to try to assist with treatment.
Daily News