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PANJIM: With the tourism season in Goa at its peak, beach safety management on Goa’s beach belt gets into top gear with hi-tech vehicles driving onto the sandy shores.
Drishti Special Response Services has moved for scrapping its old vehicles and replacing it with high-speed, fuel-efficient and long lasting 2.6 litre turbocharged jeeps.
A unique feature of the new vehicles is that they can wade into 550 mm water, up to engine level and speed up rescue operations.
“As many as 12 vehicles are being inducted into the fleet,” said a management level official of Drishti Special Response Services here in Goa.
While two are already in action, the rest will be commissioned shortly.
Drishti’s CMD Rajiv Somani has also hinted at several changes proposed in life-saving equipment for its lifeguards serving along the State’s coastline. “We have taken note of several changes needed one of which includes lifeguard surf-boards,” said Somani, pointing out that lifeguards in international waters use lighter surf boards.
The agency is also looking at vehicles that could facilitate placement of stretchers for those who need to be rushed to hospitals. “There are a growing number of heart attack cases on the beaches,” he said adding that until such cases are handed over to 108, the lifeguards have to attend to the same.
In the meantime today, nearly nine truck-loads of scrapped beach safety equipment used during the last five years were given to the tourism department for disposal.
A convoy of trucks loaded with the scrapped equipment that included jeeps, jet-skis, surf-boards, rescue tubes, old flag-poles and other junk were seen proceeding to North Goa.
On being quizzed, it was learnt from the truckers that the scrapped material was being taken to the tourism dump-yard at Pernem.
The convoy drew much attention from on-lookers and were even intercepted by the RTO at a couple of locations.
