Boxing day fire mayhem in lagos and the Fire service

Why is it that our emergency response outfits are always complaining about how the crowd hindered their rescue operations?

The recent inferno in idumota, lagos on boxing day caused by a fire-cracker where 1 person died and about 30 injured as well as buildings and properties destroyed shed light once again on our disaster mgt portfolio and their capacity.

As a safety person, It is common knowledge that when a disaster occurs, the first group of people who gets to the scene is always passersby, the community, and other stakeholders and rightly so they would naturally want to help as some of them are people whose properties are probably being destroyed right in front of them, this scenario is always expected and for the Fire service or NEMA to keep complaining about the crowd begs for another critical analysis as regards their capacity.

In disaster management, the crowd has its advantages and disadvantages, and the first thing to do is called CROWD MANAGEMENT, the fire service should learn to turn the disadvantages to their advantage by learning to manage and use the crowd. Before I delve Into a few tips as per crowd or scene management permit me to reiterate that the emergency outfits need to work on their response time, without which all we say here will always amount to nothing, having said that here are a few tips that would have helped.

1. The fire service should try to establish community relationships.
2. Appoint safety champions within communities.
3. Engage in fire campaigns and education at community levels.
4. On getting to a scene, manage the crowd by setting up barricades.
5. You need enough manpower which is not readily available so use the crowd to work, use community safety champions and Leaders to help manage the crowd.
6. Remember you need to adopt a parallel project management approach, meaning split your team up into rescue, crowd and scene managers, and then evacuations etc. While the crowd managers take over the scene the rescue and evacuation are saving lives and properties. This impacts response time as well as recovery.
7. Remember to also use the help of other agencies, police, Frsc, civil defence etc.
8. Educate, educate, educate.


The above are just tips, however what we need is actually coordination where we have a tripartite relationship. Safety is everybodys business and can't be done in isolation, the FIRE SERVICE must have healthy and efficient interagency relationship and coordination as well as intercommunity relationships completing the triangle.

As such I propose once again the NIGERIAN SAFETY COMMISSION (refer to my other posts).
A regulatory body that will look at safety hollistically and not in isolation, bringing to perspective the multidisciplinary nature of safety and its handling.

Nigeria cannot keep paying lip service to safety issues, doing things the same way and expecting a different results.

My condolences to those who were affected by the inferno, the families who lost properties and lives.

One day, one day he go better.