Durban - The eThekwini Municipality does not have the capacity to deal with a major disaster, opposition parties and the fire department have warned.
This is owing to a critical skills and staff shortage in the municipality’s fire department, which is putting the city in a precarious position.
This emerged after a report tabled on Thursday by the city’s fire chief, Mark Te Water, showed how the department’s work was hobbled by austerity measures and staff shortages.
Te Water briefed briefed the community and emergency services committee on the Fire and Emergency Services Unit’s activity reports for March and April.
Despite these challenges, the department was on Thursday commended by the city’s safety and social services committee for its “commendable” response to incidents including Tuesday’s inferno on the N2 south of Durban, near Sarnia.
The department responds to fires, accidents, floods, uprooted and hazardous trees, animals in distress, structures in “stability compromise” and offers humanitarian services.
It doused 582 fires in March and 766 in April. There were seven fire fatalities during both months – one in the first month and six in the latter.
The statistics were deemed a “remarkable feat”, considering the problems faced by the department.
In May, eThekwini’s spokeswoman, Tozi Mthethwa, told The Mercury that the city had 485 firefighters in its 20 stations. In April, the department went on a recruitment drive, targeting only women.
Te Water’s report highlighted the challenges of “stations operating at reduced service levels” owing to “overtime restrictions” in the department. These were compounded by some staff being on annual and sick leave. There were also inter-department transfers of staff.
The shortages also trickled down to the education officers who work with communities promoting safety issues, with Te Water saying the department at times had to use operational staff “when they do have time”. Owing to this constraint, educational talks were conducted on an “ad hoc” basis.
The DA’s Hillary councillor, Jan van den Berg, commended the department and metro police for the “swift” response to the dramatic tanker explosion and inferno that shut down the N2 on Tuesday.
The collision between two tankers in the early hours left commuters travelling on the N2 south of Durban stranded for hours as the road had to be closed.
Traffic had to be diverted to the M7 from the southbound lanes and to the M1 and M4 from the northbound lanes of the N2, causing gridlock that stretched for kilometres for most of the day.
Fortunately, the truck drivers escaped serious injury and no one was seriously hurt in the incident.
“Knowing the fire department’s shortage of manpower, I just would like to remind the committee of an outstanding report about the fire department’s shortages,” said Van den Berg.
He said the disaster was fairly “minor” and he was convinced that the department would take “serious strain should a fully-fledged disaster” strike.
“I am concerned… I realise that our fire department has to operate at a maximum capacity at all times. Emergencies don’t wait for working hours… Can this committee then request a report on what’s being done to address this overtime (issue)? What is the long-term solution and what is the short-term solution and the managerial vacancies?” said Van den Berg.
MF councillor Patrick Pillay was equally apprehensive about the staff shortages.
“The city’s disaster management needs to be beefed up. We don’t want to allow ourselves to be caught in a situation… where we must explain why we couldn’t respond,” he said.
Chatsworth councillor Ismail Cassimjee said fire stations were in need of repairs and had problems with provision of services.
He asked the committee to schedule “in loco” inspections of all the city’s fire stations and “have a look at the challenges that they are having there”.Community and emergency services committee chairwoman Zandile Gumede shot down the suggestion of “in loco” inspections of fire stations, saying there was “no need for this”.
“It’s not that we are in crisis. But we need to do more… If there were challenges, (Mark) Te Water would have told us,” she said.
Community and emergency services deputy city manager Musa Gumede noted the comments, saying they were “all important”.
“Unfortunately, we have confines,” he said.
“We work within certain budget constraints. Disaster management does have a lot of staff, they were utilising a lot of temporary staff because they were new in the department,” Gumede said.
“We are correcting our organogram together with fire. We are looking at whether they should be separated or not, or if it makes sense to separate them.”
He said the organogram would also look at the trainees being groomed by the department, “especially for fire and other disasters”.
The Mercury