Buildings Must Have Fire Detectors - Muntaka

Majority Chief Whip in Parliament, Alhaji Mohammed-Mubarak Muntaka has expressed mis-givings about the continuous fire outbreaks in the country. He has, therefore, urged the Ministry of Interior, under which the Ghana Fire Service operates, to ensure that all buildings have fire detectors before opening to the public. �We all know that in this country there are laws and rules in getting a building permit. One of the requirements is that the facility has to be examined by the Fire Service as an institution. �But Mr. Speaker, unfortunately, most of the buildings in our country ignore the aspect of fire safety component and they just build. Sometimes, when even the fire starts as a smoke, you don�t get signal until it is blown into a whole fire and destroy almost every item within its catchment. �As a country, we must make conscious efforts to make sure that buildings have fire detectors before they can be made to operate,� he noted. Alhaji Muntaka, also the Member of Parliament (MP) for Asawase made this observation in Parliament yesterday, when contributing to a statement made by the MP for Effutu, Alexander Kwamina Afenyo-Markin, on the recent fire outbreak at the Winneba Government Hospital. Hon. Muntaka proposed that the State must ensure that before any health or government facility was handed over to it, fire detectors should have been installed. �We know that alone cannot stop the fire from happening but it gives signal,� he noted. He urged the Ghana Health Service, during their operational rounds, not to only inspect their human resources, but also the component of the health structure to enable them fix the problem if any with their internally generated funds to avoid getting into a bigger problem. �Mr. Speaker, when even a plug is spoiled, they will keep waiting for the central government to come and fix them when in actual sense, the resources that they hold can more than fix the small problem. So, it again graduates from a very small problem that could easily be maintained or replaced into a bigger one. �You go to a hospital and you will be shocked to see wires running all over and you will wonder whether those who are managing all these facilities have seen the exposure and the danger that those electrical wiring could expose the general public to,� the Asawase Law maker bemused. Mr. Afenyo-Markin, in his statement, told the House that although there were no casualties in the fire incident, the health of the people of Winneba and its environs was in jeopardy since the hospital caters for about 400-500 patients daily. The cost of damage to the health facility, he noted was estimated at GH�2,000,000 and, therefore, urged the government to consider an urgent replacement of all medical apparatus, gadgets and drugs that got destroyed by the fire to ensure a smooth remobilization of resources to attend to the medical needs of the people. MP for Wa West, Hon. Joseph Yieleh Chireh, in contributing to the statement emphasized the need for the government to critically look at the security of all public health facilities in the country, in terms of all the risks that would be involved. He said it was about time health facilities were covered with insurance policy to address situations such as fire outbreaks to those facilities. �This cannot be any other day than now,� he stressed. He said managers of the country�s health facilities should continually check their systems, since it was very expensive to install a new machine and, therefore, urged that such measures should be instituted by the Director General of the Ghana Health Service.