By The Ghana National Fire Service (GNFS) has appealed to individuals, corporate organisations and development partners to support its flood rescue operations with boats and pickup vehicles as emergency teams respond to widespread flooding across parts of Accra.
A member of the GNFS Public Relations Team, Alex King Nartey, said that although firefighters have successfully rescued nearly 500 people over the last 24 hours, the Service’s rescue operations are being hampered by inadequate logistics.
Speaking during an interview on Joy FM’s Midday News on Tuesday, June 30, Mr. Nartey explained that the Fire Service has deployed personnel across several flood-affected communities and remains on standby to respond to new emergencies.
“We are currently at our operations centre and are very much ready to respond,” he said. “However, our logistics have been overstretched and so we still call on support from individuals, organisations and society to help us with some pickups that we can convert to rapid intervention vehicles so that we can quickly get to hard-to-reach areas,” he said.
According to him, the lack of smaller response vehicles often forces the Fire Service to deploy large fire tenders for flood rescue operations, reducing their availability for firefighting duties.
“Once we have these pickups, we can quickly attend to these incidents, allowing the fire tenders to concentrate on fire emergencies,” he explained.
Mr. Nartey also appealed for additional rescue boats, revealing that during some rescue operations, including at Adabraka and other severely flooded communities, the Fire Service had to rely on boats provided by the Ghana Police Service and the Ghana Armed Forces before rescuing stranded residents, particularly children.
He welcomed the directive by President John Dramani Mahama for the Ghana Armed Forces to support ongoing rescue operations, describing inter-agency collaboration as crucial to saving lives.
The Fire Service says rescue operations are continuing in several affected communities as search teams work to locate missing persons and provide assistance to residents displaced by the floods.
