BFP 11: Air asset still a ‘dream’

By Cheneen R. Capon
Following the Mt. Apo fires, the Bureau of Fire (BFP) 11 said having an air asset to put off forest fire is still a “dream” despite the bureau’s modernization program.
“We’ve done our best in making requests to the national office on the assets we need here. However, having air assets like helicopters is still a dream for us ,” Davao City district fire marshal Supt. Carlos T. Dueñas told reporters at the sidelines of the yesterday’s I-Speak Media Forum.
Dueñas said the BFP regional office doesn’t have the air assets which supposedly can attend to the more than two-weeklong forest fire in Mt. Apo. The bureau has to ask assistance from the Air Force of the Philippines whose helicopters are designed for rescue operations, and not for stopping blaze.
For a fire district with only P100,000 budget quarterly for the maintenance and operations of the fire trucks alone, Dueñas admitted that the bureau has a long way before it can provide all assets necessary for all fire operations.
In Davao City alone, he said, the number of fire stations here is not proportionate to the area of the city which covers 2,444 square kilometers.
With a total of 182 barangays and more than 1.5 million populations, he said, the city has only 11 public fire stations. This does not include volunteer fire stations.
“For a city as big as Davao, it should have a total of 37 public fire stations,” he added.
Aside from lack of enough fire stations, Dueñas also said the city has only 15 fire truck, of which only five are new.
Others are already decades-old.
Dueñas said procurement of fire trucks is still the bureau’s top priority. Recently, the municipalities with no fire equipment from all over the country received fire trucks from the bureau.
Meanwhile, Dueñas said the fire district here recorded a total of 211 fire incidents in Davao City for the first quarter of the year. This was higher than the 130 fire incidents on the same period of last year.
“Majority or 117 fire incidents in Davao City were grassfires, while the rest were residential,” he said. Total cost of damages reached P25 million.
The recent triple fire razes in barangay 76-A was the largest so far with P7.5 million worth of damages, he said.