Today, the Belize City Council hosted the 5th CEMO Symposium. The event brought together first responders and emergency relief agencies from around the country to review CEMO's efforts over the last year, as well as to discuss strategies for improving emergency response. This year, after a string of fires devastated the city, the symposium revolved around fire awareness and management. We spoke to Belize City Mayor, Darrell Bradley, who acts as the Chairman of CEMO, as well as Fire Chief, Ted Smith, about the presentations over the next two days...
Darrell Bradley - Mayor, Belize City
"This is the fifth year that we've been having the CEMO symposium and the idea is that when we talk about emergency management a main aspect of it is actually capacity building and sharing information using best practices and really having a forum where first responders and emergency management practitioners and also policy makers and elected officials can convene together and to over two days share strategies. It's also an opportunity for us to raise awareness about topical issues, one of the things that I said in my presentation is we are very proud of the evolution of the CEMO symposium over 5 years. We've been able to focus public awareness on critical areas. We spoke previously about climate change, flood mitigation, hurricane preparedness which are mainly the focal areas of emergency management. A lot of our work in the year is about climate change, flood mitigation and hurricane preparedness but we also as we raise in our own awareness must think that the symposium must evolve. The last six months we've seen a spate of fires in Belize City, most recently the Majestic Alley fire where we had approximately 80 people who were displaced. We had a good contingent here this morning from San Pedro; they recently were hit by a major fire in San Pedro. So that we use the symposium as an opportunity for us to focus our energies on what are some of the more pressing emergency risks within our various municipalities and fire has been one of them so that over the next 2 days the various participants will be privy to a series of presentations on various aspects of fire prevention and fire emergency management."
Ted Smith - Fire Chief
"What we will discuss here the fire department will do a presentation in 5 different stages which is the management of the fire service, the legislation that governs the fire service, which ministry it falls under and we going into the proactive side of the fire department, the fire safety efforts that has been made in order to mitigate the likely hood of fire occurring and to educate. This involves sensitizing the public in what we do, to reduce fire that involve inspection of public places and night clubs as well as to look at plans to ensure that early warning fire suppression capability are in some structures and that they are also fire support suppression capabilities within the structures. The fire department is prepared as best as it can, we are always prepared to the best of our ability based on the resources and man power we have. The amount of people you say in there they are drawn from all over the country because we are not just a Belize City fire department we are a national fire service so we have not drawn too much from Belize City in order not to short our capability to respond when an incident occur. These people are drawn from all over the country of course some are from Belize City as well."
In order to strengthen CEMO's and the Fire Department's ability to respond to fires of all kinds, a special consultant was brought in. Peter Robinson, who is a representative of Resolve Mariner Group in Florida, gave a presentation about dealing with fires that occur aboard ships at sea...
Peter Robinson - Commercial Manager
"The content of our presentation is based mainly on marine firefighting; ship board firefighting and it will also be pointing out the significant differences between ship board firefighting and structural firefighting which will be described in the program as terrestrial firefighting. Ship board firefighting in our presentation will deal with the fundamentals for fighting fires on-board ships. It will outline type of information, type of assets or type of response equipment that are used on particular for ship board firefighting. Structural firefighting is about entering a burning building to save people within the building and to put the fire out the building. Ship board firefighting is going on-board a ship, the primary goal is to do evacuation of the crew but more times the crew would have already been evacuated from a ship that is on fire. Evolution of fire on-board a ship is different from evolutional fire on land for example in your house it may happen a lot faster. On-board ships a lot of the material are fire resistant materials however when a fire starts on-board a ship even with effective management of the fire it can burn for days. So the way it is handles is totally different because you're dealing with a fire in a steel box which is much hotter than fire within a tall burning building and it is also different in the way you fight it for example on-board a ship you look to kill the fire, starve the fire of oxygen by closing all access to it, you can't do that with a structural fire because you have to go inside a structural fire. Your dealing with normal lives, you have to open it up to go in to get people out and fight the fire so its contrasting way to obtain the same means."
Robinson told us that some special training will be necessary to properly equip Belize's fire fighters with the skill necessary to fight shipboard fires.
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