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Broken fire truck worries Bethanie residents

RESIDENTS of Bethanie Village in the south are keeping their fingers crossed that no serious fire breaks out at the sleepy village after the only fire truck they have failed to respond to a fire at a school because it broke down.

A council worker told that the fire truck has been out of service for almost a month due to a mechanical fault.

The Namibian, during a visit to the village last Friday, discovered that most of the council’s vehicles are off the road except a pickup truck, sewer vacuum truck and three-wheel motorbike.

This was confirmed by locals who told The Namibian that council was apparently unable to to repair the vehicles due to limited financial resources.

They said some of the vehicles have out of service since last year. Last Wednesday, council workers were forced to use a sewer vacuum truck to fight a fire that broke out at the hostel of the Roman Catholic Church’s Schmelenville Secondary School.

“We had to resort to using the sewer vacuum truck to put out the fire at the hostel,” a council worker, who prefered not to be named, said.

An electric short-circuit had ignited fire which gutted down three dormitories at the boys’ hostel last Wednesday at around 15h00.

Twenty-two boys in Grade 8 and 10 lost all their belongings, except the clothes they were wearing, in the fire.

“We attempted to salvage the boys’ belongings, but could not save anything because the fire, which was fuelled by winds, was too strong,” said hostel matron Christa April.

April said no one was injured in the fire as most of the boys were attending afternoon classes at the school when the fire broke out.

She said three boys, who were inside the dormitories at the time, escaped unharmed and sounded the alarm.

The matron believes that if council had used a proper fire engine to extinguish the fire, the damage to the property could have been minimised.

“Council workers were struggling to extinguish the fire because the hosepipe connected to the vacuum truck was too short,” said April, adding that luckily a farmer came with a water tank with a longer hose and helped put out the fire. She said the church leadership last week assessed damage to the property but could not reveal the cost of the damage.

“We expect the renovation work to start soon,” said April.

Meanwhile, the matron said, the affected boys were moved to a spare room behind the church hall and expressed gratitude to those who donated toiletries and other items to the affected boys. The council’s acting secretary, Michael Minatzick, refused to comment and referred The Namibian to the council’s chairperson, Aletha Frederick.

Frederick said the poor response to the fire by the council was due to broken vehicles, which “needs a collective answer”. “Since I took office, the practice was that council should first meet and then respond collectively to media queries,” Frederick stated.

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