PANJIM: As part of various initiatives on fire safety measures, Directorate of Fire & Emergency Services has trained nearly 3500 secondary school teachers, besides others, on basic fire safety and evacuation drill in the last couple of years.
“Under SAFE (Student Awareness of Fire Education) program, the department initiated in creating awareness among teachers and students of schools from 2010, which yielded good result. Under the Training of Trainers program for secondary teachers in ‘basic fire safety and evacuation drill,’ the department has trained 3500 teachers. During the current year, 201 teachers have been trained,” Fire and Emergency Services Director Ashok Menon said at a National Fire Service Day function on Friday.
He said that under another scheme ‘safer school safer India’, 144 primary teachers who in turn trained 11,301 primary students were trained.
Apart from this, the department has trained 758 sponsored candidates in various aspects of basic fire safety, general fire prevention, evacuation drill and disaster management and fire fighting training during the last financial year. “Training is the key function which ensures that our personnel remain technically and physically competent to deal with any emergency,” he said.
Continuing with the department’s initiative to fine tune the functioning, Menon said they are collaborating with the Department of Earth Sciences, Goa University as a knowledge partner for developing analytical knowledge tools. “This will aid the department in hot spot mapping of high hazard areas relating to risks and creating fire hazard index to help identify locations to fire causing factors. The tools will be useful for determining similar indexes for other hazards like road accidents, etc,” he added.
Aiming to ensure technology reaches citizens, the department has envisaged developing ‘Safe Goa 24X7 Emergency Monitoring System’, which will benefit in integrating global positioning system to facilitate utilisation of fleet of fire fighting appliances. “It will also enable the department to issue online NOC for those occupancies that are compliant with the requirement of fire fighting measures thus implementing the government’s objective of e-governance,” he added.
