Fire that destroys
Editorial
Guyana Chronicle
June 8, 2004
FIRES continue to destroy homes across the Guyanese coastland, leaving families homeless and broke, and making officials worry about the perceived failure of adults to keep children away from matches and other inflammable substances.
We're not suggesting by a long shot that all or most of the residential fires that occur in Guyana every year are set or in some way caused by children.
But Guyana Fire Service officials believe that most of those fires caused by unsupervised children are avoidable.
We were moved to comment on fires again by speculation that the fire which destroyed a house in Sheet Anchor, East Canje, Berbice, last Friday evening was started by one of the two children left in the building.
The children's 25-year-old mother was returning home from work when she saw smoke bellowing in the sky and instinctively said it was her home going up in flames. She was right.
Some neighbors didn't accept that the children were at fault, but the mere mention of them as the potential cause of the fire points to the need for appropriate measures to keep children out of the reach of matches and, lighters, lit candles, and other inflammable materials.
Not all children are fortunate to escape injury -- or death. In early 2002, when two children "roasted" to death in a fire at Bachelor's Adventure/Paradise, East Coast Demerara, most Guyanese balked at the gruesome sight of a picture of one of the children that appeared in a newspaper.
Few disputed the father's claim that "fire bun" was responsible for the deadly fire. He probably knew what he was talking about. But if, as the preliminary findings of the Guyana Fire Service indicated, the blaze resulted in three-year-old Christopher and/or two-year-old Ronaldo Ajeday playing with matches, that ought to have been a wake-up call to parents and guardians across the country to keep children out of the reach of inflammable substances, or these substances away from the reach of children.
For us, fires that involve children ought to do several things:
depict in grisly detail the tragedy of leaving young children unattended or unsupervised;
highlight the tragic consequences of inflammable substances being left within the reaches of young children;
underscore the desirability of a public awareness campaign to sensitize and/or re-sensitize parents and guardians to the possible loss of life and property that results from adult carelessness; and
bring into sharp focus the need for legislative measures to penalize parents/guardians who leave their young alone in locked buildings.
One of the first reactions to legislation that some people express is that measure that seeks to regulate people's behaviour would be irrational, discriminatory, and/or oppressive.
But it may not be enough for the Guyana Fire Service to respond to a fire call by rushing fire tenders and officers to put out a blaze, or to send investigators to determine the cause of a fire. The fire service must assume a correspondingly pro-active role in recommending preventive steps and working with related agencies to effectively implement them.
We, in democracies like Guyana, oftentimes presume that people know what is required of them and that they will do what has to be done without being required by law to do so. But preventing fire hazards is too important a matter for the authorities to leave to the personal morality of individuals.
We've lost too many lives and property to fire already.
We therefore once again urge the Guyana Fire Service and the Ministry of Home Affairs to take whatever additional steps are necessary, and urgently, too, to save Guyana from these devastating fires. If they don't, we'll be playing with fire that destroys, to our great loss.