I become a fireman...

Last Sunday I joined the Placencia Fire Department, which will be setting up a substation in my village of Seine Bight. This all sounds impressive, but you may not remember the picture of the fire truck, so here it is again -

This is actually a very practical rig, especially in Placencia village, where a major fire destroyed several businesses and homes several years ago. It was fought with a bucket brigade. This machine can travel on road or beach, basically to get the pump to the water's edge, where it can be set up, and we carry enough hose to go about 200' . That's not far enough where the peninsula is wide. We need some form of a tanker truck, as well as a lot of other equipment. So you may be asking yourself - why doesn't the town have a fire dept?

Well, the issue goes back to Belize being a backwater British colony. Large tracks of land were granted to the English elite when the colony was primarily a source of mahogany. Property taxes were kept very low for these absentee owners, and the primary support for the colony came from import duties. That tax structure remains the same today. The national government is the only taxing authority. I've priced out having my restaurant directory printed in the states, where it can be done much cheaper than here, but when you add the 10% General Sales Tax plus the 34.795% import duty, the playing field levels out. The duties help support the government, and also stimulate manufacturing in the country.

Although there are village councils, they are dependent on the national government for funds. And there aren't many - it is a poor country, and they only support fire departments in the bigger towns. For us, that's Dangriga. It took their truck an hour to get to the big fire here a couple of years ago. That's when the Placencia Rotary Club sprang into action, and formed the VFD, and remains its primary means of support.

Back to last Sunday. We trained, which meant about 6 of us, set up the pump, ran out the hose, and pumped a little water. It was useful to me to learn how it was all supposed to be set up. But it wasn't useful on Monday.

I started home from work at 5 or so, and as I was passing through the village, dodging pedestrians, bicycles, dogs, kids, and the occasional car or truck, I heard someone yell, FIRE! I looked at the source of the holler, and a member of the dept called out that there was a fire about 2 miles north of town. I got through the village as quickly as possible in the described conditions, and headed north - which is the way home. A few minutes later I found a woods fire on both sides of the road - the woods being palms and scrub growth. There were 3 or 4 people fighting it with shovels and a five gallon bucket, and the truck wasn't there. Since I was wearing sandals and shorts - not ideal for fighting fires, I rushed the mile home, changed into jeans and my most protective footwear - sneakers, grabbed the only implement we had, a pitchfork, and headed back. Met the truck, which was trying to find access to the beach. The effort proved futile, the fire was out of range of our hose. Fortunately, on the ocean side of the road there was a lot of standing water because it is the rainy season, and the wind died at about 6:30, so we were able to snuff it out. We thought another crew had snuffed the fire on the lagoon side, but as I headed home at 8 or so, there was still active fire, so I and another guy put out what we could see.

So I joined and trained on Sunday, and fought a fire on Monday. Now I'm working to see if I can locate used equipment in the states that can be shipped. We didn't even have axes or saws to cut down the palms that had fire in them. No Indian pumps. This certainly is a land of opportunity!