March 01, 2007	Thursday	Safar 11, 1428

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RAWALPINDI, Feb 28: While the world observes International Civil Defence Day on Thursday to highlight the importance of the organisation in times of peace and war, the city’s civil defence is still without basic equipment or manpower to deliver due to the neglect of the concerned authorities.

March 1 is being celebrated as the International Day of Civil Defence all over the world, including Pakistan, which is the 50th member of the International Civil Defence Organisation.

A French surgeon, George Saint Paul, had established the organisation in 1937, originally named the Neux De Geneve Association, which was later renamed Civil Defence.

The civil defence Rawalpindi was set up here due to the sensitivity of the city, in 1951, but it still lacks basic equipment that are necessary in any given emergency situation.

It has no machinery, manpower, volunteers, fire fighting arrangements, bomb disposal experts, kits, metal detectors, X-ray machine and many other necessary equipment necessary for averting or dealing with an untoward incident.

According to the rules of civil defence, there must be 80 volunteers for a population of 20,000 people but interestingly, there are only five volunteers in Rawalpindi for the population of four million people, according to 1998 census. If the prescribed ratio is to be observed, there should be 16,000 volunteers.

Sources in the civil defence told Dawn on Wednesday that the much-trumpeted National Volunteers Movement (NVM) had not added a singe volunteer to the Rawalpindi office.

Three days ago, fire erupted in Moti Bazaar engulfing 45 shops and small stalls as the civil defence were not equipped to extinguish the flames.

The department has no water-gun machines for extinguishing fire in multi-story buildings, though it has fire fighters for this purpose.

All important installations like PTCL, Airport, grid stations, Sui Gas, oil depots, oil refineries in Rawalpindi are ill- equipped to avert any disaster on their own while the civil defence would also fail to deliver in any emergency situation.

There must be warden posts (20 rescuers) at each commercial and industrial unit but this is nonexistent in the garrison city of Rawalpindi.

The apathy of the concerned authorities can be gauged by the fact that the civil defence Ralwalpindi has only one 20-year-old vehicle (1987 model) which has done 224,000 kilometres and is now in a push-start condition to deal with emergency situations.

District Officer Civil Defence Raja Liaqat confirmed to Dawn that his office was ill-equipped to cope with emergency situations.

He said 30 posts were lying vacant in his office since 1971 including those of rescuers and bomb disposal experts among others.

Malik Maqsood Paikar, a volunteer, urged President Gen Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz to provide modern equipment to civil defence for enabling the department to cope with emergency situations.

The federal government’s initiative to set up Disaster Management Cells, at the district level, is yet to be established in Rawalpindi —the closest district to Islamabad.

Recently, a resolution was approved by the Punjab Assembly which sought 10 per cent marks for the students having a certificate of civil defence but the law is yet to be implemented across the province.

There is no medical allowance for the employees of civil defence who are injury-prone due to the nature of their job as they are required to handle crisis situations.