sto­ries by Gail Alexan­der

Se­nior Po­lit­i­cal Re­porter

Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Fitzger­ald Hinds says the min­istry aims to give the T&T Fire Ser­vice the re­sources it needs to per­form more ef­fi­cient­ly.

Hinds in­di­cat­ed this dur­ing Par­lia­ment’s Stand­ing Fi­nance Com­mit­tee meet­ing yes­ter­day, where he was grilled by UNC MPs Rod­ney Charles, David Lee, Roodal Mooni­lal, Sad­dam Ho­sein, Kadi­jah Ameen, Di­nesh Ram­bal­ly and Ravi Rati­ram on the min­istry’s $2.6B Bud­get fund­ing.

Hinds said the aim im­me­di­ate­ly to have as many Breath­ing Ap­pa­ra­tus Kits (BAKs) as there are fire­fight­ers, as not all T&T Fire Ser­vice per­son­nel are fire fight­ers. They are not yet at that stage of hav­ing BAKs for each, he said, not­ing 50 are avail­able for im­me­di­ate use. A pro­gramme to re­pair BAKs that are re­pairable has been un­der­tak­en.

Hinds added, “And re­cent­ly, Cab­i­net ap­proved pur­chase of 225 units - we’re mov­ing ex­pe­di­tious­ly on this. Mean­while there are suf­fi­cient BAKs to at­tend to more than one fire at the same time, as the Fire Ser­vices moves around ap­pa­ra­tus. Some fires re­quire BAKs, some not,” Hinds said.

“If there’s an event, re­port­ed on time and all things be­ing equal, the Fire ser­vice will re­spond to it and there are suf­fi­cient BAKs avail­able to man that and oth­er fires at the same time.”

Hinds said he is al­so await­ing a re­port from the Chief Fire Of­fi­cer on a fire of­fi­cer al­leged­ly burnt due to lack of a BAK.

“The ques­tion of the cause of the in­jury is still to be de­ter­mined,” he said.

Hinds said there are 25 fire sta­tion in T&T and he an­tic­i­pat­ed they’ll all be out­fit­ted with a wa­ter ten­der and oth­er equip­ment. Five sta­tions lack stand-alone ten­ders and ac­tion will be tak­en to pro­cure ve­hi­cles for ten­ders, he said. Three sta­tions un­der re­pair are al­so soon ex­pect­ed to be op­er­a­tional.

Hinds, who said there’s al­ways room for im­prove­ment, de­nied the Fire Ser­vice is a “sham­bles”.

On re­ports of the ac­qui­si­tion of 20 wood­en lad­ders cost­ing $50,000 each, but now un­used, Hinds said the Fire Ser­vice re­quest­ed these and the min­istry fa­cil­i­tat­ed. Mean­while, Hinds said Foren­sic Sci­ence Cen­tre pathol­o­gists are work­ing at op­ti­mal ca­pac­i­ty and there has been no pile-up of bod­ies as be­fore. He said Gov­ern­ment is work­ing with the UNDP and re­gion­al­ly to re­cruit a third pathol­o­gist for the cen­tre.

He al­so said the Na­tion­al Crime Pre­ven­tion pro­gramme is un­der re­view af­ter Gov­ern­ment’s pol­i­cy shift to crime as a pub­lic health emer­gency and use of a whole of so­ci­ety/re­gion ap­proach .

Re­view of life­guards’
work arrange­ments

Hinds al­so said he will al­so be ap­proach­ing the Cab­i­net im­mi­nent­ly on a draft pol­i­cy rec­om­mend­ing the re­work­ing of life­guard arrange­ments to im­prove this area and en­sure the pub­lic is ad­e­quate­ly served on beach­es across the coun­try.

He said there are 140 such posts and six are va­cant. On the lack of life­guards some­times, Hinds said arrange­ments for the life­guards, who are dai­ly-rat­ed work­ers gov­erned by a trade union, was a “very pe­cu­liar one”.

He said their col­lec­tive agree­ment states their work­ing time is 10 am to 6 pm but not­ed peo­ple go to the beach 8 am and are there af­ter 6 pm. He said when beach­es are crowd­ed, how­ev­er, the work­ers stick to the agree­ment. To get them to work out­side of 10 am to 6 pm “re­quires tremen­dous amounts of over­time,” he said. They’ve been called out on hol­i­day week­ends be­fore, but even when they agree to this, on the ac­tu­al day, on­ly a hand­ful do, he added.

“So the prob­lem con­tin­ues. As a con­se­quence of that, I’ve de­vel­oped a pol­i­cy po­si­tion­—a draft - where we looked at the life­guard arrange­ment as it now ex­ists (and) we’ve looked at the prob­lems which re­sult in the pub­lic not be­ing ad­e­quate­ly served. We’re mind­ful of that and I’m ap­proach­ing the Cab­i­net any minute now with that pol­i­cy and some rec­om­men­da­tions for a re­work­ing and an im­prove­ment in these arrange­ments,” Hinds said.

He added, “Hope­ful­ly, get­ting Cab­i­net’s agree­ment would lead us to be­ing able to treat with this prob­lem and pro­vide a bet­ter ser­vice to the peo­ple. When ap­proved I’ll speak of it more.”