By Federick Dramadri

Government has donated a 1.3 billion shillings firefighting equipment to the regional Police Fire and Rescue Brigade Police in West Nile region to aid response to emergencies of fire outbreaks in the region.
Mirko Mucuda, a technical engineer at Ziegler Company says this vehicle has unique features and should be able to address to address the rampant fire outbreaks in the region.
“This is high technology we do for Airports and it carries only four people. It has a mobile computer technology with sirens on top of the communication equipment to aid communication and we really hope this will be helpful to the Police in this region”, he said.
This comes as the region is grappling with maintenance of government vehicles, most of which are lifted to Kampala for repairs. But Ziegler Company has pledged a three years’ maintenance service on the vehicle, with a training of local technical personnel to manage the equipment.
Sembuayi Ismail, an engineer from the Police mechanical workshop said this is manageable only if the team is guided well by the manufacturer.
“This is the latest technology with many electronics and I will confidently say that our technicians can handle it as well. Although it has unique features most of them are advanced electronics, but with the right technical capacity building, it will not be a challenge to operate it”, he said.
Inspector of Police Michael Mungacel, the West Nile regional fire prevention and Rescue officer says the region has been grappling with rampant cases of fire outbreaks due to lack of equipment.
“In a month we receive on average 20 cases of fire outbreaks and most of these cases happen at night. Our people tend to leave electrical appliances on when they go to sleep and we had only one machine and this machine that we had which is a water tanker is not meant to fight fire. So this machine is going to boost our efforts in fighting fire out breaks in this region”, he said.


COVER PHOTO: The fire brigade officers being taken throuh the technicalities of the new vehicle by Mirko. Photo by Federick Dramadri.