The Africa Fire Mission was started by former Glendale (Ohio) Fire Chief David Moore after a visit to Addis Abba, Ethiopia in 2012, where he discovered the need for more modern fire equipment and training.
I joined a four-member team of firefighters, organized by AFM, for a 12-day mission to teach firefighting and fire safety education to our counterparts in Nairobi, Kenya. In addition to Chief Moore and me, Cincinnati Fire Capt. Matt Flagler and my son, Fishers (Ind.) Fire Capt. Todd Rielage comprised the team.
Under the leadership of Director and Chief Brian Kisali, the Nairobi Fire Service is organized along the British Fire Service’s brigade model. In conjunction with the St. John’s Ambulance Corps., it also provides ambulance service for a portion of Nairobi’s 3.4 million inhabitants.
The NFS has three fire stations, but operates only two on a full-time basis — one in the central city and the other in the industrial area of Nairobi. Their apparatus comes from several European manufacturers with pumps, or fire engines/water tenders, being mostly Rosenbauer on Mercedes heavy-duty truck chassis.
The pumps have high ground clearance for on- and off-road use — especially for fighting fires in the slum villages that house millions of residents. They carry about 3,000 gallons, or 12,000 liters, of water designed for fast attack; only the central city has a system of fire hydrants for a sustained water supply.
Their aerials were manufactured by Magirus and Rosenbauer, the largest equipped with a 57-meter or 188-foot platform tower. By contrast to the slums, Nairobi is also building hundreds of modern high-rise buildings in both the central city and its suburbs.
Maintenance of both fire apparatus and equipment is a continuous challenge due to a lack of money, parts and knowledgeable mechanics, but the equipment we found in service was fully functional.
Donations and training
In mid-July, AFM shipped a 40-foot container full of SCBA and PPE turnout equipment to its partner agency in Kenya, the Mission of Hope, International. The Chesterfield – Union Township (Ind.) Fire Department donated the SCBA following their acquisition of new breathing apparatus. The remainder of the PPE was destined for overland shipment to Zimbabwe where the fire service is in its infancy.
Our primary goal was to train NFS firefighters to use lightweight, modern SCBA. While some older U.K. breathing apparatus was available, most firefighters were still using filter masks to combat smoke conditions.
Matt and Todd took the lead on this training. Both are graduates of the National Fire Academy’s Executive Fire Officer Program. But before we began, an unexpected problem arose.
The NFS uses several outside companies to fill its SCBA and ambulance oxygen bottles. However, their primary contractor had never seen an air bottle using and aluminum inner core surrounded by a composite fiber shell.
They initially refused to fill our bottles until we had a face-to-face meeting to show them that the composite bottles exceeded steel in strength. It took them several days to come to the conclusion that they could fill our bottles.
In the meantime, Todd and Matt found an ingenious way to fill the composite bottles from a small cache of reserve steel air bottles on hand in the NFS maintenance area.
Shift changes
In order to train all of the Nairobi firefighters on the Blue, Green and Red shifts, training began an hour after each shift change. One shift would begin at 9:00 hours and last until 17:00 hours, when another shift would come on duty at 17:00 until 9:00 the next day.
Because of the rotation of the shifts, we had to repeat the orientation training both day and night each day before beginning the hands-on sessions for each shift. Our typical training day lasted from 9:00 to 20:00 daily.
We were surprised that the veteran firefighters first grasped the significant improvements of the lightweight SCBA before the younger firefighters. Many of the veterans attended several classes, even off duty, to impress their younger counterparts with the importance of this new SCBA training.
Between shift trainings, Todd and Matt also met with the on-duty station officers and sub-officers to discuss their wants and needs for ongoing station drills and shift training.
During that time, I met with the NFS fire prevention educators and fire inspectors to discuss how to reach the hard-to-reach from international visitors to the residents of the slum villages. In order to get a better feel the fire safety issues, we twice walked the Mathare Valley where nearly 750,000 people are compressed into a 3 square mile area.
While I have seen slums or ghettos throughout Asia and other third world areas, I have to admit I’ve never seen such a concentrated population in such a small area.
The predominate construction of a 64-square-foot home is corrugated aluminum supported by 1-inch diameter tree limbs lashed together to support roofs and walls. I saw such structures house up to seven members of one family with most sleeping directly on the dirt floor.
Residential hazards
The residents rarely own the land on which they live. Normally they rent these units for the equivalent of $100 or more a month.
For those who want to have electricity, the landowner will usually supply a single, 240-volt line to the home from a bootlegged or unauthorized electric line haphazardly attached to a legitimate electric light pole or transformer. Often these are no more than an old Romex electric cord buried underground to avoid detection and then spliced with anything from lamp cord to bell wire to the individual shack.
The end-user has barely enough electricity for a 60-watt light or a small appliance, but not both simultaneously. The heat from the electrical resistance, especially with the use of undersized wire, generally wears the wire bare and easily ignites a wooden structural member or the cardboard used for roof or wall insulation.
In addition to fires, shock hazards are prevalent, especially during the rainy season.
Cooking and careless smoking are also major causes of fires in the slum areas. Cooking is done with a wick stove, or charcoal or wood open fires either inside the home or, when the weather permits, in a stone outdoor fire pit.
The wick stove uses kerosene or paraffin as its fuel. It is similar to a camping stove only without many of the safety features. One of the most dangerous practices is refilling the stove while it is burning, When overfilled, either the wicks begin to float or the flammable liquid spills.
Often, the stove is stored next to combustibles such as a chair or mattress. Other times, winds can blow littered paper into a cooking fire and then onto an adjacent home igniting the structure or its contents.
Delayed response
While English and Swahili are the predominate languages, adding to these fire prevention issues are the multiple districts within the Mathare Valley — each district belonging to a separate tribe with its own unique customs and dialects.
In one meeting attended by both NFS fire prevention personnel and Mission of Hope’s community health educators, we secured a working agreement between the groups to adopt a common fire safety education curriculum to be used by both sets of workers.
During our time in Nairobi, there were four major fires in slum areas. With only two stations and extremely grid-locked traffic — the only traffic lights in the central city — a 20 to 30 minute fire department response is the norm.
Frustrated residents frequently take out their anger on the responding firefighters by hurling rocks and stones, which cause the firefighters to retreat to a safer area.
Part of the adopted curriculum also educates the populace on the issues surrounding the fire department response, such as the lack of a centralized telephone number to summon emergency services.
To help combat this challenge, our group suggested the use of ATVs equipped with fire suppression systems to help hold fires in check until the NFS can arrive. A Chinese manufacturer recently donated 12 such units, but no approved plan had been provided for their use.
Mission of Hope and NFS held preliminary discussions on dispersing some of these units into secure, guarded facilities adjacent to the slum areas. We also discussed training reliable workers as first responders to incipient fires in these critical areas.
While such a plan sounds rather simple, the concept must work its way through the city and county government for approval and then find a core of dedicated individuals who will take the training to assure its success.
Despite exceeding our expectations in training and prevention, much is still needed to address the fire problems in Nairobi. However, we continue to greatly admire the work of the NFS and its firefighters for their commitment to service. They showed us the true meaning of dedication and perseverance under extremely difficult circumstances.
