Report sought on death of two rescuers

LAHORE: Punjab Home Department has taken notice of the death of two Rescue 1122 employees who died in an operation taking out a person who had fallen into a manhole and directed the authorities concerned to investigate the matter, The News has learnt.

According to a notification of Home Department Director General, PES, Rescue 1122 was directed to furnish initial report of the incident and share occurrence report about any such happening with Home Department without delay.

According to the notification, it has come to the notice of Home Department that two Rescue 1122 employees, including Ashiq Ali DERT, Rescue (BS-11), died in Bahawalpur District on Sunday during an operation to rescue the person who had fallen into the manhole. The competent authority has taken notice of loss of another precious life of Rescue 1122 employee. Home Department directed a comprehensive probe report to ascertain the causes along with fixation of responsibility in case of negligence regarding subject matter be submitted to this department on Wednesday (today) on the following term of references (TORs). These included qualitative and quantitative analysis of human resource available for emergencies management as per requirement of divisional headquarters, quality of training imparted to rescue employees to cope up such incidents and approval of training curriculum from competent forum, approval of SOPs to deal with such technical incidents and forum of approval, availability of essential safety equipment that is multi gas detector, SCBA/SCUBA, personal protective equipment, including rescue harness, ropes etc in the responding vehicle.

The notification required information about what were the purchase dates and operational life of the vehicles and equipment used in the incident. After tragic incident of Pakpattan District in which a rescue employee lost his life in a drowning case management, what measures have been taken to improve the water emergency equipment & trainings and to save the precious lives of Rescue 1122 employees. Home Department recommended Rescue 1122 to improve safety of Rescue 1122 employees and to enhance the capacity of emergency service in Bahawalpur.

Our correspondent adds: Centre of Excellence in Water Resources Engineering (CEWRE) University of Engineering and Technology (UET) Lahore organised a national capacity building seminar on Hydro-Meteorological Data for Drought and Flood Forecasting.

The seminar aimed to enhance the capacity of junior and middle level scientific, executives, engineers, hydrologists and other technical staff of relevant organisations and students of the leading institutions of Pakistan.