Jesse Ramdeo

Over the last five years, there have been 3,500 house fires that have claimed dozens of lives and caused mil­lions of dol­lars in prop­er­ty dam­age, fire pre­ven­tion of­fi­cer Jude Rogers said yes­ter­day.

“The stark re­al­i­ty of the sit­u­a­tion is that there is an av­er­age of 700 house fires an­nu­al­ly, that is an av­er­age of two fires a day and that is a very telling sta­tis­tic,” Rogers said.

In the last month alone, fires have gut­ted homes in Val­sayn, Moru­ga, Mara­bel­la, Ch­agua­nas and San Fer­nan­do. Rogers said res­i­den­tial fires are not the on­ly chal­lenge, as fire of­fi­cers are bat­tling more bush­fires.

“We have a large amount of fires tak­ing place. Cur­rent­ly, we have an av­er­age of 38 bush­fires we are deal­ing with on a dai­ly ba­sis through­out Trinidad and To­ba­go and that is an alarm­ing fig­ure be­cause ... how many fire ap­pli­ances do we have to re­spond to all these fires at any giv­en time?”

He said in the last five years, deaths by fire av­er­aged be­tween 20 and 25 peo­ple. He said three ma­jor fac­tors con­tribute to res­i­den­tial fires - elec­tri­cal faults, hu­man er­ror and ar­son.

“The fact is we need elec­tric­i­ty to func­tion dai­ly but when we do not pay at­ten­tion to how we in­ter­act with elec­tric­i­ty in our homes, this is where we get chal­lenges, be­cause the fact of the mat­ter is our elec­tron­ic de­vices need to be checked, we have to en­sure our cir­cuits are not over­loaded,” he said.

Rogers said ad­just­ments are need­ed to pre­vent loss of life and prop­er­ty.

“The cul­ture of fire safe­ty in this coun­try re­al­ly needs to change,” he said.

He said fire pat­terns al­so point­ed to a lack of ad­her­ence to build­ing codes for those in con­struc­tion.

“You see those build­ings which the lay­man or nor­mal cit­i­zens build, where you do not need or may not have sub­mit­ted your house plans to the Trinidad and To­ba­go Fire Ser­vice, that is where we see peo­ple do­ing ba­si­cal­ly what­ev­er they want to the best of their knowl­edge.”

Rogers cau­tioned home­own­ers against ob­struct­ing pas­sage­ways and ex­pressed con­cern about the in­stal­la­tion of bur­glar proof­ing with­out the re­quired safe­ty fea­tures.

He ex­plained: “I want to bring it to your at­ten­tion, there are key­less bur­glar-proof­ing de­signs. We in the Trinidad and To­ba­go Fire Ser­vice work to­geth­er with the Trinidad and To­ba­go Bu­reau of Stan­dards and al­so the small build­ing codes of Town and Coun­try and we have a stan­dard for key­less bur­glar proof.”

Mean­while, As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T In­sur­ance Com­pa­nies (AT­TIC) di­rec­tor Bali­ram ​​​​​​​Sawh said home in­sur­ance ap­peared to be on the back burn­er for cit­i­zens.

“A lot of peo­ple think noth­ing will hap­pen and pay­ing this pre­mi­um every month is mon­ey they can al­lo­cate else­where, es­pe­cial­ly when you have some try­ing fini­cal cir­cum­stances,” Sawh said.

“That prompts peo­ple not to see in­sur­ance as a pri­ma­ry ob­jec­tive in terms of the dol­lar spent, but if they have mort­gages, they will have no choice but to buy in­sur­ance to cov­er the prop­er­ty.”

Sawh said to re­build from the ash­es, it is crit­i­cal that the sum in­sured on one’s home al­so cov­er the costs to re­build at to­day’s mar­ket val­ue prices.