KAY-MARIE FLETCH­ER

Se­nior Re­porter

kay-marie.fletch­er@guardian.co.tt

The Trinidad and To­ba­go Fire Ser­vice has two new fire trucks but they can’t be used in an emer­gency just yet be­cause they aren’t reg­is­tered.

This was con­firmed by Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Fitzger­ald Hinds, just five days af­ter vi­su­al­ly im­paired Mal­colm Di­az, 98, per­ished in a house fire in San­ta Cruz on Fri­day.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia fol­low­ing the Pass­ing Out Pa­rade of Batch One of 2022 at the Po­lice Acad­e­my in St James yes­ter­day, Hinds said fire ten­ders get old, be­come de­funct and of­ten must be re­placed.

He al­so ex­tend­ed con­do­lences to the fam­i­ly of the de­ceased.

Hinds said, “Two of them ar­rived. These are cus­tomed built ve­hi­cles, built for pur­pose. One of them was on dis­play at the In­de­pen­dence Day Pa­rade and I have been in­formed by the Fire Chief that in re­spect of oth­er or­ders, they are in the process of reg­is­tra­tion to be able to fit the road. We are in this con­stant busi­ness of re­plac­ing stock, re­pair­ing, keep­ing them mo­bile.”

On the death of Di­az, Hinds said, “On this oc­ca­sion, un­for­tu­nate­ly, a cit­i­zen lost his life and again I want to ex­tend con­do­lences to the fam­i­ly... We look for­ward to get­ting to the place where we hope we will not lose a sin­gle house, a sin­gle roof nor a sin­gle life to those kinds of events.”

The lack of fire trucks across the coun­try con­tin­ues to com­pro­mise TTFS’ abil­i­ty to re­spond to fires and save lives.

Last month, three peo­ple, in­clud­ing moth­er Natasha Nan­coo, 48, and sons Adesh Joseph, 10, and En­rique Reyes, 19, per­ished in a fire at their San­gre Grande home.

In two sep­a­rate in­ci­dents in Ju­ly, two el­der­ly men, 75-year-old Michael Cor­num and 78-year-old Win­ston Blake, al­so lost their lives in sep­a­rate house fires in Point Fortin and Mal­ick.

And in April, Kem­ba Mor­ris and her daugh­ter Za­ya, 8, died in a fire af­ter be­ing trapped in their home in Siparia. At the time, res­i­dents com­plained there was no func­tion­ing ten­der at the near­by Siparia Fire sta­tion.

As a re­sult, fire of­fi­cers had to re­quest a ten­der from the Pe­nal Fire Sta­tion, which ar­rived al­most an hour af­ter the emer­gency call was made.

Just weeks lat­er, two Pe­nal fam­i­lies lost their homes to fire.

Re­ports in­di­cat­ed that sav­ing the struc­tures were im­pos­si­ble be­cause the first fire ten­der that ar­rived when the first house was on fire was not equipped with suf­fi­cient wa­ter to con­tain the flames. By the time the sec­ond ap­pli­ance ar­rived at the scene of the fire, it had al­ready spread to an ad­ja­cent house and de­stroyed it.

In April, Guardian Me­dia al­so re­port­ed that there were no fire trucks at the Ch­aguara­mas, Wood­brook, Bel­mont, Mor­vant and San­ta Cruz fire sta­tions.