"Fire Department of the KMC has only four fire tenders that are in working condition," he said while talking to the media during his visit to the SITE area paper factory where fire had broken out at midnight Sunday. Five fire brigade vehicles and one snorkel took part to douse the blaze. The rescue officials took many hours to completely extinguish the inferno as the fire brigade department team reached the site quite late while their equipments turned out to be insufficient to deal with the situation.
Waseem Akhtar said that the rulers in Islamabad must play its part to equip this mega with needed infrastructure to cope with the fire incidents because Karachi is commercial capital of Pakistan with its 70 percent revenue contribution to the national exchequer.
"When I took over as Mayor a year ago, the condition of these fire tenders were pathetic as even their pumps were not working properly," he said, adding that, anyhow he got them functional. It may be mentioned here that various commercial and high-rise buildings in Karachi have been facing serious safety threats as no law is present, which could envisage setting up a central regulatory body for implementing mandatory regulations and measures to cope with fire or similar life-threatening emergency situation.
Representatives of the concerned non-governmental organizations said that at present only chapter 13 and 14 of Karachi Building and Town Planning Regulations 2002 provided fire safety rules for buildings in the city but utility, relevance, and effectiveness of these regulations had become too much limited.
Karachi had witnessed tragedies due to fire such as hotel fire, Baldia Town factory fire, Timber Market fire, Bolton market fire, etc. At least 30 incidents took place in Karachi in a year causing loss of lives and heavy damages to properties and infrastructure wasting millions of rupees, but the city's authorities failed to overcome the challenge.
In order to improve fire brigade's performance, the Mayor said that more vehicles, fire fighting equipments and fully-trained staff were needed to do this job. He said he adopted all available options for empowerment of the local bodies system. He said he had approached the court of law to get justice in this regard but to no avail. Now, he said, he was left with no choice but to stage protests.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2017